Linz, Friday 25th of April

Days like today, days on which I wake up, recognize where I am and feel a slow big smile spreading over my face even before I open my eyes always make me feel a bit guilty. I always feel like I accidently got served someone else’s portion and feel like any second there might a waiter come running to dismantle the error.

I’m at the Crossing Europe Film Festival in Linz, Austria where I’m gonna dj on Saturday. They invited me to stay a couple of days longer and for once I decided to take a couple of days off although the Musikverein is brimmingly busy at the moment but when aren’t we? So instead I’m chilling with the aforementioned big smile at a cute fake-chinese hotel room with dragon paintings and lots of bamboo. I had a yummy big breakfast and when I sipped on my second cup of coffee the radio in the background played one of my favourite songs: Hidden Camera’s “The Good Of Life”. Then I walked over to the festival center at the OK which is just around the corner, got my accredition pass and had the nice suprise of meeting a friend of whom I had totally forgotten that she works there and we chatted a little.

As this was a far too happy start into a day for a gloomer like me the first movie I chose to watch this morning was ‘A l’intèrieur’ / ‘Inside’, a french horror movie by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo. It was nice aesthetic splatter entertainment. The story is about a pregnant woman who lost her lover in an accident. On christmas eve, the day her baby is supposed to be born, she gets hussled by another woman that turns out to be the driver of the other car involved in the accident. That woman had lost her baby back then and now comes to get hers instead. I love how striking, simple and strong symbols and taboos get played with. The holiness of motherhood, stressed by the mother supposed to give birth on christmas eve, gets torn down quite a bit. What I liked is the kind of broken mirror play that movie uses: Different aspects of the characters or constellations seem to mirror parts of each other, for example: One mother loses her child in an accident, one child kills her mother by accident, one child loses her mother and so on. The title plays at two things: From time to time you get the point of view of the baby in the mother’s womb, see how it is affected from the violence. And the whole horror action takes place inside of one house in which the mother is trapped. It’s a movie that seems to be interested in the beauty of cruelty. It celebrates the bloodshed and pain in a strangely attractive way. There is a dark beauty in the blood drenched sensuality that reaches an erotic high in a scene where the intruder slowly crawls over the body of the pregnant woman and kisses her. This aesthetic is somehow in contrast to the standard splatter imaginery that is also there, like when one kid gets a scissor rammed through his forehead and slowly pulls it out again. The movie isn’t totally consistent but still one of the best horror movies I’ve seen. It even has a amusing undead scene. All in all I think I twitched about four times, gave five grinning moans for explicit violence, and laughed at least three times.
Now I’m sitting at the OK center café and am waiting for the next movie while I type these lines and there’s supposed to be WLAN but of course I don’t get a connection. Tsk. I’ll have to post this later.