Film Review: Piercing

"The First Step Is To Get Her Tied Up And Gagged. She'll Probably Try To Run..."

Presenting itself as one of the more difficult releases this month to try and seek out amidst flying, glowing superheroes and wide-eared elephants, Nicolas Pesce, director of both The Eyes of My Mother and the upcoming remake of The Grudge, returns for his second big screen feature in the form of Piercing, a scathingly dark adaptation of the 1994 novel of the same name from Ryū Murakami, the Japanese author most famous in the world of cinema for his 1997 novel, Audition, which formed the basis for the unforgettable Takashi Miike directed horror of the same name from 1999. Featuring a joint leading role between Christopher Abbott (First Man) and Mia Wasikowska (Crimson Peak), Piercing sees Abbott take on the role of Reed, a seemingly successful white collar family man with a newborn baby to boot, who after feeling a sudden urge to inflict pain on his ever-crying child with an ice pick, decides to take his murderous impulses elsewhere away from the family home. Cue the introduction of the blonde infused Wasikowska as Jackie, an anxiety ridden but sure footed prostitute who quickly takes up the opportunity for work and makes her way over to the stylish high rise in which Reed awaits for a night with messy consequences. 

Whilst any story stamped with the Murakami name upon it is guaranteed from the offset to get you ready for a narrative which won't exactly be for everyone, let alone mainstream audiences, Pesce's movie at least attempts to startle and amaze in all its' B-movie charm as it works its' way through a splendid eighty minute runtime in which a high proportion of the action is simply Reed and Jackie together in various hotel suites. With strange animated backdrops which look like outtakes from the Anime section in Tarantino's Kill Bill: Volume 1 and a wicked blend of jet black humour and stomach twisting violence, Piercing is indeed effectively flashy and features an abundance of art-deco inspired style but is also a movie which strangely suffers primarily from being hesitant in its' depiction of exploitation, resulting in a endpoint which doesn't seem to go far enough. Whilst there is no denying that the movie features an underlying and unnerving sensibility as you watch two people of similar strangeness come together, the final credits certainly left me gasping for more of a killer, no pun intended, instinct, but with two superb central performances which manage to effectively balance the gap between comedy and horror, Piercing is good enough but by no means on a par with previous adaptations of Murakami. 

Overall Score: 6/10