Breeder (2020): reclaiming the torture horror? (Review)

The 2000s cycle of torture-themed horror – commonly referred to as “torture porn”, and my, doesn’t that term get you some looks when you casually use it around people who aren’t obsessed with minor horror subgenres – may be the only cinematic trend brought down by a billboard. Advertising for the film Captivity, showing a blonde woman being slowly killed under the tagline “Abduction. Confinement. Torture. Termination“, was protested by several Hollywood figures, and the film’s anaemic box office contributed to a sense that the subgenre now had nothing more to offer but ever-increasing misogynistic violence. That said, one of the complainants was Joss Whedon, whose own feminist credentials are currently under a serious critical review. Might it be time to re-examine torture porn? If not exactly misunderstood, might it at least be open to the same kind of redemptive readings that have brought new interest in once-similarly-disreputable movements like grindhouse and 1950s B-movies?

Director Jens Dahl and screenwriter Sissel Dalsgaard Thomsen hope so. Their new film Breeder, released under Eureka’s Montage Pictures division, is set in the same kind of grimy, sodium-lit basements familiar from a thousand Saw sequels, but underneath the surface is a set of distinctly feminine anxieties about the birth and childcare industries, as well as the untrustworthiness of seemingly respectable men. The latter role is filled by Anders Heinrichsen as Thomas Lindberg, whose wife Mia becomes ill-advisedly curious about his work for a major biotech company. An attempt to investigate leads her into those aforementioned grotty basements, and now we’re partying like it’s 2006.

Cards on table time: I have never liked the torture porn subgenre. The Saw films, at least, have a certain baroque invention in their plotting, and French entries like Martyrs and Inside at least bring some original ideas with their gore. The killer problem, for me, is not a matter of taste or sexual politics but a lack of suspense: once your lead character is strapped into a chair by a maniac with a power drill, you can’t possibly persuade me the situation is going to get any worse, and so it becomes very easy to tune out all the excess until the inevitable third-act escape attempt. For all Breeder‘s ambitious commentary on gender and the medical profession, it still doesn’t fix these basic problems. Even the crudest slasher movie uses its violence to advance the plot – if only to let you know that one of the murder suspects has been eliminated – but the scenes of women being whipped and branded in Breeder achieve nothing other than making you question where the funding for this came from, and what was stipulated in it.

Having said that, Breeder avoids pushing some of the easier buttons that a cruder film might rely on. It is implied that the men imprisoning the female research subjects are motivated by sexual sadism, but this remains an implication. The branding scenes suggest NXIVM has joined Abu Ghriab and Guantanamo Bay in torture porn’s unholy trilogy of real-life inspirations, but rape is not part of the villains’ toolkit. This may be because, as Thomsen notes in the interview that makes up the disc’s lone extra, principal villain Dr. Ruben was written as male, yet Borgen‘s Signe Egholm Olsen was cast in the role. This would ordinarily be laudable – a similar piece of blind casting made Ellen Ripley into an icon – yet it does muddy the film’s intended critique of misogyny. You want to find out how Dr. Ruben can reconcile her femininity with her career of performing fertility experiments on kidnapped women, yet the answer – which would make her a substantially more interesting character – never comes.

As it is, Breeder‘s feminism mostly manifests itself in the third-act worm-has-turned action, as well as a pleasing streak of machismo-undercutting black humour. I was particularly amused by the sudden, sharp cut from a man trying to produce a sperm sample to Dr. Ruben dismissively examining the result: “Well, the amount isn’t important”. At its best, it suggests a genre companion to Second Run’s recent release of Albert Serra’s Liberté, another film that drags turn-of-the-millennium transgressive cinema tropes decisively into the 2020s. Too often, though, it makes you wonder if Dahl and Thomsen have kept up with evolving conversations about gender and empowerment in film since their subgenre’s heyday. That fascinating interview in the special features also sees Dahl claim “Horror traditions are that you kill off a horny blonde in the first scene… we make her the main character”. Readers may remember Joss Whedon claimed a similar line of thought led him to create Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Thanks for reading Graham’s review of Breeder

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