Your Flesh Your Curse by Billy Crash

Your Flesh Your Curse Will Haunt You

“The fucked get fucked,” may be the one line that says it all about Kasper Juhl’s Your Flesh Your Curse.

His hammer blow into emotional distress is a vibrant, unsettling ride as we follow Juliet White (Marie-Louise Damgaard Nielsen) in her perpetual downward spiral into psychological terror.

An arthouse horror with a Lynchian feel at times – and due to questions of sanity and perception, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion rears its mentally diseased head quite often – Your Flesh Your Curse explores Juliet White at her lowest ebb when her mind comes undone and she can’t go on. This may seem simple and even trite, but Juhl makes certain we don’t fall into mundane sentimentality or follow a path already taken with such a dramatic storyline.

Your Flesh Your Curse is a sorrowful, harrowing, and unflinching walk through the bowels of Juliet’s world.

Juhl’s cinematography sets the tone with rich blues, intimate composition, and a penchant for making color and contrast resonate with solid lighting as well as intense darkness. To complement the visuals, Anders Norddal Jendresen’s music fills the void, when needed, to profound and often gut-wrenching fashion.

Your Flesh Your Curse presents a subtle story that delves into the effects of abuse and the madness it creates by limiting dialogue, exposing the harsh truth of Juliet’s nightmare with an unflinching camera. The narrative thrives in the action, which is perpetually disturbing and makes for one potent arthouse entry.

But know this: Marie-Louise Damgaard Nielsen owns Your Flesh Your Curse. Her performance is powerful, full of intense emotion, and as gritty as Rodleen Getsic’s method acting in The Bunny Game and Isabelle Adjani’s exhaustive performance in Possession. Marie-Louise loses herself in the role and suffers as a soul being dragged through her own Hell.

Some scenes could have been edited down a bit, but that would have taken away from the fact that the audience must endure Juliet’s torment as she does. The only bothersome things are unnecessary chapter headings, and a scene where Max (Frederic Carlsen) repeatedly slaps Juliet. But the camera angle’s a bit off, which makes it clear that many of those “hits” aren’t even coming close to her cheekbones.

Juhl crafted a strong piece of psychological horror due to a steadfast camera capturing a nightmarish implosion that keeps the audience up close to the horror of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and even self-punishment. This intimacy generates an intimate foundation we can’t escape from, and neither can Juliet.

At one point, The Skinner (Emma Nymann) refers to her friend Juliet as “Jules,” which leaves one wondering if Your Flesh Your Curse is a cathartic venture for director Kasper Juhl. If so, I hope he’s shrugged off such demons, though his film will haunt viewers for some time long after the credits roll.

 

The Plot Sickens: Check out Billy Crash’s review of a different kind of slasher: Last Girl Standing!

 

Billy Crash

Also known as William D. Prystauk, he loves great, in-depth characters and storytelling in horror, and likes to see heads roll, but if you kill a dog on screen he’ll cry like a baby. Billy co-hosts THE LAST KNOCK horror podcast on iTunes, and can also be found on Twitter, LinkedIn, IMDb, Amazon, Behance, YouTube, Instagram, and Google+.

 

(Still from Your Flesh, Your Curse courtesy of Screen Anarchy.)