Yes, this is a foreign film from 2008. It almost makes me feel…sophisticated.
In Left Bank, a young professional runner is sidelined after a potentially career ending injury. It’s during her down time that she falls in love with a nice, but mysterious car salesman. She ends up moving in with him, into an apartment where the former tenant had gone missing. As her life turns to shambles and the legend of a black hole is explored, it turns out this Samhain will be one she’ll never forget and one she cannot run from.
Left Bank is written by Christopher Dirickx and Pieter Van Hees, who also directed the feature. The film stars Eline Kuppens, Matthias Schoenaerts, Sien Eggers, Marilou Mermans, Frank Vercruyssen, and Robbie Cleiren.
I watched Left Bank with subtitles, so if you ever watch it, be prepared to read the entire movie. But hey, some people actually enjoy that.
Left Bank is a really interesting horror film because of the way it handles the genre. The film is full of very character driven subplots, sprinkled with mystery and drama. The horror elements are ever-present, but take a backseat to everything else going on. While people are going missing, nightmares are becoming reality, and the mysteries are becoming deeper and deeper – there is still a lot to watch in other genres, more specifically romance and drama. I’ve never seen a horror film before that was filled with danger and the supernatural, yet played so well into other genres.
Remember how I said that I felt sophisticated watching Left Bank? Well, there is a lot of unsophisticated things that you will watch. I vividly remember a long sex scene that America would never allow in theaters, a stiletto shoe coming out of a vagina, and a rat coming out of someone’s gangrene infected knee. Pretty horrific, right? Just wait until you get to the very end.
There are a lot of themes in Left Bank too. Some of them include what you sacrifice for love, what you sacrifice for a hobby/career that you love, that history repeats itself, and especially themes about the afterlife and certain views on re-birth. I would say that re-birth and starting life over as someone else – reincarnation I guess you could say – is the biggest theme here. Although, in Left Bank it’s not so much a spiritual choice as much as it is a process forced upon you. You just have to watch the movie for that to make sense…
Left Bank was pretty enjoyable so I would definitely recommend it to horror fans who enjoy scary, supernatural flicks with a lot of depth and character derived plots.
