Beaten to Death is a film I can’t in good faith recommend to everyone, just to get that out of the way early. That said, I do recommend this film. Sam Curtain’s Australian horror is a phenomenal and grisly examination of one man’s will to live while simultaneously begging the question –should he even want to live after all this?

Brutality and the absolute absence of human kindness and empathy tend to lend itself well to bleak and violent horror like Beaten to Death. But, while one might want to lump Beaten to Death in with such nihilistically dreadful films as Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek (2005) or Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (2007), that would be a mistake, as I feel there is something Curtain is expressing in the narrative that goes deeper than bad men doing bad things – an exploration into something more personal.

Opening in the midst of chaos, we are introduced to Jack (Thomas Roach, Blood Hunt) as he runs blindly through the sweltering outback, literally blindly, his bloodied eyes are covered in a filthy cloth. The film then flashes to a gigantic bear of a man beating the absolute hell out of Jack, and from there, we flit between the past and present with only Jack’s excruciating accumulation of injuries to guide us forward. There’s a certain amount of ambiguity to being dropped so abruptly into the story this way, as it’s the audience’s instinct to empathize with the man being tortured, despite having no clear awareness as to what brought him to this place in time. Without knowing, we identify the man as the protagonist, as the victim, and we yearn to see him get out alive. But, for all we really know, Jack may well have done something awful, something unjustifiable, because, why else would he be experiencing these atrocities?

The story feels biblical, like a parable, and there’s just too much cruelty to believe it’s all for nothing. It feels like Jack is on the receiving end of the wrath of God, not of man. And as Jack repeats that it was all just a “stupid mistake,” it feels like there must be something more, something he’s withholding from himself even, that the mistake must be massive. This makes it all the more painful and baffling when we finally get the flash to what really led Jack to his fate.

Beaten to Death is pain. Nearly supernatural in its wretchedness. The film culminates in the kind of heartbreaking ending that leads me to wonder what Curtain and co-writer Benjamin Jung-Clarke were going through while penning this story. Nearly every scene drips with visceral suffering, but also, there are tiny seeds of hope planted in the dirt and blood. The film feels confessional, filled with regret and guilt, and these feelings stick with the viewer long after the last horrific reel.

Thomas Roach delivers a performance that vacillates between simmering desperation, child-like confusion, and rage, while David Tracy (Sorrowland), as one of the three men who enact this violence upon Jack, is unforgivably savage while also coming across as undeniably human in his righteous fury. Beaten to Death will test the limits of the audience it reaches and is ultimately a shocking and breathtaking feat of barbaric realism in cinema.

💀💀💀💀/5