Behind The Cross (2012)
Directed by: Tomi Kerminen
Written by: Tomi Kerminen
Starring: Marica Vaisto, Monsieur Camüs, Petri Niemi, Tomi Kerminen
Finland 2012
RUNNING TIME: 38 min
REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera, Official HCF Critic
Father Michael is both a serial killer, with 45 known victims in various countries to his credit, and a man of the cloth, albeit one who had a childhood full of pain, ridicule and neglect. He sends his gimp Piggy Boy out to kidnap young women so he can brutalise and kill them while desperately trying to cling to what he thinks is the light….
The reviews of short films on this website tend to be fairly brief because…well…however good the film in question is, there’s less to write about! However, Behind The Cross is both longer than the average length of a short film, and is also a film about which there is a lot to say! Director/ producer/ writer/ star/ Tomi Kerminen mentions the influence of old-school Italian horror in his film and states a love for Dario Argento and David Lynch, but also says that his film is influenced by two truamatic personal experiences. Indeed, there is a powerful, palpable sense of anger and pain in Behind The Cross which bleeds onto the screen. It probably goes without saying that it’s not a happy watch – in fact it’s a rather depressing one – but it’s my personal view that too many films these days of this nature and subject matter go for easy laughs in an attempt to lighten the mood, or make things more palatable for viewers, showing a slight lack of conviction. Behind The Cross is uncomfortable viewing, but at the time it’s stunning filmmaking and will certainly make you think after you’ve seen it as you struggle to get its powerful images out of your mind.
Behind The Cross opens with black and white clips of three women on some kind of dating organisation, then a beautifully shot countryside scene in colour where a woman is out walking her dog when she comes across a large bag with something obviously inside it. Then suddenly a man bursts out with his eyes gouged out crying: “Father!”, and I’ll be damned if this isn’t one of the best jump-scares I’ve seen this year! Kerminen immediately shows that he knows how to do this kind of thing really well. Then we go onto the titles, with slightly Goblin-influenced metal playing over black and white images of things like women in cells and a man with a gimp mask. In what seems to be the end of a typical day for Father Micheal, he goes to church to dip his finger in a cup of blood, put it in his mouth….then goes off to masturbate in his car. We are immediately told the conflicting elements of this guy, who may be a serial killer and a pervert but is still clearly deeply religious, but the film soon seems to ask if these elements really are actually that conflicting? As we flash back and forth in time between Michael as an adult and Michael as a child, we get a really disturbing, yet very believable, portrait of religious faith gone totally wrong. Isn’t this not very far from, for instance, extremist Islamic terrorism, which has twisted and perverted the original religion on which is is supposedly based? Kerminen’s film has some very bloody and nasty scenes, from a nail-gun murder to crucifixions to the best blood-being-poured-over-somebody scene since Carrie [the original], and also contains much transgressive imagery, but what really makes it disturbing is the questions it asks, and how frighteningly convincing it all is.
Stylistically Behind The Cross is constantly audacious as it moves from shaky handheld filming to static still shots, from black and white to colour, from naturalistic lighting to heavily-filtered lensing, my favourites of the latter being some gorgeous scenes which are bathed in red. You even get to hear the voices of Ulli Lommel and Richard Stanley [if only he would make another film!]. Though its violence may seem horribly real, albeit not dwelled on any longer than it needs to be, as the film goes on it begins to adopt a more surreal approach.I guess that in the hands of some film makers, all this may have resulted in an annoyingly chaotic end product, but in the case of Behind The Cross it seems entirely appropriate, especially considering its subject matter. Meanwhile the director, and I mean this in a good way, is simply terrifying as the main character. You can feel his pain and anger while still never forgetting the fact that he is a remorseless killer. In fact, in the blackest of ironies, this Godly man has become the Devil.
As well as the influences Kerminen has stated, Behind The Cross also reminded me at times of the work of Gaspar Noe and Alexandro Jodorowsky, while still seeming new and fresh. I hope that he is given to chance to make a feature [I would love to see a longer version of Behind The Cross], because it’s not the 1970’s any more and at the moment the cinema needs filmmakers like him more than ever to shake things up a bit. Kerminen’s voice is a powerful one and is crying out to be heard.
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