Note: this review is for the uncut, R18 version of the movie.
The Green Inferno is just Eli Roth's fourth feature film, which is kind of amazing considering how prevalent his name seems to be in the cinematic zeitgeist. The movie fits easily within his oeuvre, the director once again pushing the boundaries of taste with extreme bouts of violence and controversial subject matter. This time, he takes inspiration from one of the infamous films of all time, Cannibal Holocaust. But this film lacks the element of surprise, and it turns to be a tad tamer than one might expect.
College student Justine (Lorenza Izzo) joins up with a group of campus activists, drawn to their charismatic leader Alejandro (Ariel Levy). They head out to Peru to protest the destruction of a native village by a corrupt energy company. Unfortunately for Justine and the rest of the activists, their plane malfunctions on the way back and crashes in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. And soon, they are abducted by the very natives they were trying to protect, who have some terrible things planned for these intruders.
The first half of the movie will test the patience of those going into this looking for the gory cannibal action. The film starts sluggishly as it firsts paints out how exactly Justine ends up with this band of activists. We meet friends that won’t pop up for the rest of the film. We learn about her relationship with her dad. We watch in a class gaining her social conscience after a lecture on female genital mutilation. These are all details that aren’t very relevant in the end. And in spite of all this time spent with these characters, the movie isn't actually able to build its characters very much. Apart from Justine and Alejandra, the characters are pretty indistinct, which makes their eventual deaths land pretty poorly.
The film does pick up once the characters are in the village. Surprisingly, the film doesn't focus on the violence. There is a lot of gore here, but the film actually builds its horror from the sense of otherness. The film gets as much out of scenes of everyday life in the village as it does from the scenes from dismemberment. As dubious as this all might seem, the movie makes a genuine effort to show the life of the village beyond the terror of the cannibalism. It makes clear that there is something there worth preserving, even after the bodies are dismembered and consumed.
This still doesn't add up to much, however. The movie seems to be driving at some sort of message, but it's all very dodgy at best. And there are a couple of loose ends in the narrative, the film forgoing the satisfaction of resolution for the sake of the possibility of sequels. The filmmaking is weirdly amateurish as well, with lots of drab imagery and clunky editing. The film does gain much from its lead star, Lorenza Izzo, who ably projects the desperation and confusion of her character through her very expressive eyes.
The strangest thing about The Green Inferno is that it isn't actually as depraved as one might think. It's shot such that the violence is almost abstracted, the camera rarely shooting wide enough to really capture the extent of the awful things happening to those bodies. It's kind of artful in a way, but to true fans of gore and cannibals it might be a disappointment. And it is already a bit of a disappointment to begin with, the movie just taking too long to get the stuff that it's been promising.
My Rating:
