ESSENTIAL KILLING (Jerzy Skolimowski). 84 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens today (Thursday, March 31). See listing. Rating: NNN
Essential Killing’s story takes place almost entirely in the moment. An insurgent (Vincent Gallo) who’s captured in Afghanistan after an attack on U.S. forces is transported to an unidentified nation – probably Poland – for further interrogation. But before he reaches his final destination, a car accident on a snowy road lets him escape into the vast surrounding forest, where he does his best to elude his pursuers.
Director Jerzy Skolimowski has no time for politics, dialogue or anything approaching complexity he simply tells a story about a man trying to survive in an utterly foreign world from one moment to the next, at any cost.
Looking remarkably like Joaquin Phoenix circa 2009, Gallo disappears into his wild-eyed, inarticulate character, a shell of a man reduced to his most basic instincts – robbed of language, of identity, of everything except his mind and his body.
Essential Killing stumbles near the end when it introduces two key female characters whom Skolimowski renders as stereotypes rather than archetypes. I can’t help but wonder how someone like Werner Herzog might have handled this material it might not have been more thoughtful, but the odds are its last reel wouldn’t have teetered on the edge of silliness.
