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KNIFE+HEART

Starring: Vanessa Paradis, Kate Moran, Nicolas Maury, Jonathan Genet, and Khaled Alouach
Written by: Yann Gonzalez & Cristiano Mangione
Directed by: Yann Gonzalez

“The more you kill me, the more I love you.”

France delvers the gay grand guignol of your dreams in Knife+Heart. Coming in hot from some love at Cannes and standing as one of this year’s hot ticket screenings at the Boston Underground Film Festival, this gory, slutty, and oftentimes beautiful piece of horror stuns with its ferocity, but also with its tenderness. By now you have surely heard about this film’s…equipment, shall we say, but Knife+Heart reveals itself as so much more than just another trashy slasher (though it still is VERY much that in equal measure). Hard to describe, but wholly unique and enriching, Knife+Heart is everything you could want from a horror movie, but oh, so, so much more.

Paris, 1979. A ragtag group of gay porn stars and their stalwart, family-like crew are ramping up production on another erotic masterpiece. But behind the scenes drama between their director Anne (a hauntingly watchable Vanessa Paradis) and their in-house editor Lois (the angelic Kate Moran) threatens to tear their makeshift queer family apart. Oh, and also there is a masked killer on the loose, executing people with a dick knife. As in…a huge dick, like a dildo, but with a knife sheathed into the dick.

From the jump, director Yann Gonzalez, who also co-wrote this glorious little feature with Cristiano Mangione, goes for the throat. The cold open of the movie is a wickedly paced and staged mini-giallo, establishing our masked killer, played with intensity and appropriately stagey affectation by Jonathan Genet. He stalks through clubs to the pulsing sounds of M83 (who also provide this film’s entrancing soundtrack) baiting a victim with pleasure, but delivering only death with perhaps one of the more hilarious, but wonderfully symbolic objects of death in horror cinema.

What follows from there is best described as “giallo-filtered through French Surrealism.” Gonzalez and his beautiful, immensely talented, and gender fluid cast take all the fun of a giallo and make it gay as all hell, twisting the genre into a meditative but fun shocker. One that can have a whole kill sequence built around a blowjob, but also can also be a heart-wrenching relationship drama about two women, drifting away from one another. I haven’t the slightest idea how they pulled it off, but they did. It manages to be all things to all people in regards to genre filmmaking. It is both the highest of high art and the lowest of lowbrow and it does both beautifully and genuinely.

To say any more would spoil some of the real wonders of Knife+Heart, but rest assured, if you love horror and love queer cinema, then get thee to the movies and experience this thing for yourself. After captivating audiences around the festival circuits, I feel like this thing could end up being a real crowd pleaser and “thinking person’s horror movie” in equal measure once it gets out into the wild. It has all the cheap, horny thrills of a slasher, but with a whole heap of themes and imagery to dig into, for straight and gay film theory readings alike. Don’t even get me started on the way Gonzalez shoots Anne’s dream sequences in a garnish, film negative exposure. Basically, it’s great, and you should see it as soon as possible. Doesn’t matter if you’re an egghead or a slut, Knife+Heart has the goods.