WOUND (2010)

Streaming on Tubi!
Directed/Written by David Blyth
Starring Kate O’Rourke, Te Kaea Beri, Campbell Cooley, Sandy Lowe, Brendan Gregory, Ian Mune

Wow. This film…just…wow.

I remember watching filmmakers like Kenneth Anger, John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and David Lynch for the first time in college and realizing how much horrific and bizarre potential the medium of film has. These folks made films that aren’t so much interested in storytelling because the metaphors that lie within are satisfying enough. Some call them art films, but I think doing that gives them airs that don’t apply. To me, they are just works of genius, and having just seen WOUND, I think it’s safe to say that David Blyth would be right at home with the filmmakers listed above.

Taking place in a strange surreal world where every interaction is recorded via a quick cam, WOUND follows a depressed and submissive Susan (heartbreakingly played by Kate O’Rourke). Susan has a dead-end job as a telemarketer, is in an abusive sexual relationship with a dominating man, and when we first meet her, she castrates and murders her father on camera, wraps the penis in tin foil, then tosses it in a cooler with what looks like many other tin-foil wrapped members. But maybe not. Blyth films everything as a dream-like acid trip with Susan wearing a huge mask that looks like a mannequin version of herself and carries a two-headed doll around her mazelike house rigged with cameras. Blyth even dips his pinky toe into the found footage genre as we follows a dream-like narrative by flipping through the cameras following Susan through the house and her life outside.

Soon Tanya is introduced, played by the scrumptious Te Kaea Beri. Though she goes to a Christian boarding school, she is tempted to see the seedier side of the world by going into goth clubs and experiencing things like sadomasochistic torture, leather-masked pig men, and of course lots of smoke machines, leather, and spikes. We come to understand that somehow Tanya is Susan’s child. But Susan believes she miscarried her child long ago. Taking a page from Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY, Blyth does narrative POV shifts between Tanya and her mother who seem to switch places, merge and diverge again throughout the story. Those who are lost or irritated now by this description should scroll on now. Those intrigued by experimental filmmaking and narrative are in for a treat with WOUND.

If the topsy-turvy plot doesn’t get you, the gore will. Gratuitously gory birth and rape sequences occur with great frequency. The aforementioned castration scene is performed without a cut. And I’m not even mentioning the disgusting creature that is The Beast. Blyth will definitely disgust and disturb even the most hardened of gore hounds.

WOUND is a surreal masterpiece that relies heavily on the metaphor but doesn’t bury it so that it is impossible to understand. Ripe with symbols of motherhood and birth, WOUND is a harrowing journey though a very unhealthy mind. Literal thinkers will be left scratching their heads, but those who love to experience imagery you haven’t seen before will want to seek out the staggeringly disturbing WOUND.

Check out the trailer here!!