BEATEN TO DEATH - Mark Reviews Movies

Beaten to Death, Welcome Villain

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 31, 2023

The central question of Beaten to Death, perhaps, is whether the title is a threat or a promise. Neither option is particularly appealing, not only and especially for our main character, but also for us, who have to watch this guy be savagely and brutally pummeled, tortured, mutilated, and sent on a seemingly hopeless journey toward both revenge and escape for almost 90 minutes. It's difficult to determine any kind of redeeming quality to witnessing that process, repeated over and over during the course of the movie. It's particularly tough to do so within the context of the fragmented way this narrative is structured.

The poor guy is named Jack (Thomas Roach), a man who's introduced in co-writer/director Sam Curtain's movie on the business end of some very punishing fists. He's first seen in close-up, as those punches, belonging to a burly biker-looking man (played by Andy Krambousanos), land and land again and again, leaving Jack's face an increasingly bloodied mess. Whenever he can catch his breath during the beating, Jack calls out for his girlfriend/wife Rachel (Nicole Tudor), who's lying unresponsive in an adjoining room of the remote cabin where he and she have gone, for reasons that are eventually explained.

To be clear, the movie isn't just an hour and thirty minutes of this, although it certainly feels that way or even worse, considering how much more Jack must suffer, how many times he seems to overcome the various challenges—to put it incredibly lightly—he encounters, and how only more pain and suffering result from his unwillingness to surrender to death. In theory, Curtain and co-screenwriter Benjamin Jung-Clarke have crafted the premise for an eerily believable and unrelenting horror story, because it's difficult not to imagine ourselves in a similar position, since the movie never leaves Jack's presence.

At a certain point, it's almost a guarantee, though, that every single person watching this movie will regret such flights of empathetic fancy. Maybe it'll arrive quickly, while the first tough guy throws those blows, only to briefly stop for a break and to return to start choking Jack. Perhaps it'll be later, when another attacker pulls out a knife and promises Jack that his dead wife/girlfriend is the last thing he'll ever see. If the regret doesn't arrive then, just wait a minute for Curtain to give us a POV shot of the knife-wielder finishing the job he starts.

There really isn't much more to this story apart from the violence, which is often gruesome, or the sense of helpless dread, as we're blindly thrown into Jack's constant torment and as Jack blindly—as in literally so after a certain point—stumbles, fumbles, and occasionally fights his way toward some sort of uncertain salvation. The in-the-moment story is so thin in terms of characters and plot that the narrative has to move backwards and forwards in time, just so it doesn't appear to be as nihilistically repetitive as it actually is.

Some flashbacks reveal that Jack and Rachel were blandly happy once (We see her singing at a bar where he's out with some friends, although there's nothing to tell us who they are or what they're relationship actually is at that point), only to come across some financial difficulties. Finding themselves desperate, they go from the city to the country, where they meet the guy who'll eventually start bashing Jack, with a terrible plan and without the means to accomplish it.

The forward jumps show us Jack at some point in the near future, still trying to find his way out of the situation. At least the guy only has to deal with nature and exhaustion in those scenes, although the movie has trained us to expect the worst—and, somehow, even more than that—at every given turn. That makes the story's final revelation an anticlimactic error in judgment—not only in general, but also in the specifics of the editing, which gives away the game for us but cruelly keeps Jack in the dark.

The whole affair just feels cruel from the start and keeps finding new ways to escalate that feeling. In some ways, the movie is made well. For whatever it's worth, the bloody and gory violence looks realistic enough, while the suspense of Jack trying to outrun and outwit a threat with so many advantages on him is sporadically effective (The first moment of nasty irony—when Jack discovers who a pragmatically helpful man, played by a quite good David Tracy, actually is—packs a, for once in this movie, figurative punch). Mostly, though, Beaten to Death feels less like a threat or a promise and more like a description of how the filmmakers treat their premise.

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