Mark Reviews Movies: FOR THE SAKE OF VICIOUS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 15, 2021

Screenwriter and co-director Reese Eveneshen begins For the Sake of Vicious with an intriguing mystery and a diabolical moral dilemma. Is a man guilty of a particularly heinous crime? If he is—as his accuser is certain—and the legal system has failed in bringing him to justice, is there a moral justification for trying to enact one's own brand of justice? There's the alternative, though: If the accused man is innocent, just how awful are the accuser's actions, and how culpable in them is the person who allows this vigilante process to proceed?

Eveneshen and co-director Gabriel Carrer offer this conundrum as the starting premise for their literally and figuratively claustrophobic thriller, which takes place primarily in the kitchen in a small and cramped house and is populated by only three characters. There's the accuser, who is convinced a man raped his young daughter and was wrongly acquitted in court. There's the accused, who insists the verdict was correct, and there's a relative stranger, a nurse who cared for the man's daughter. Her landlord is accused man, whom she finds lying unconscious in her home upon returning from a late shift.

None of this, unfortunately, matters in the end. At a certain point in this tale, Eveneshen, having presented us with such a thorny setup about morality and justice, pretty much announces that he gives up on anything too tricky or thoughtful or legitimately disturbing. You'll know the moment when it arrives. It's when all the senseless killing starts.

Romina (Lora Burke), the aforementioned nurse, does come home, expecting a fun Halloween with her son, who's currently staying with her mother. Instead, she discovers Alan (Colin Paradine), her landlord, lying bruised, bloodied, and knocked out on her living room floor.

Before she can do anything or call anyone, another man makes his presence known and chases Romina around the house. He finally gives up and pleads for the nurse to hear what he has to say.

She recognizes him. He's Chris (Nick Smyth), whose daughter came to the hospital a few years ago after being sexually assaulted. After tending to Alan's injuries and letting Chris tie the landlord to a chair, Romina decides to listen.

Chris is convinced Alan raped his daughter. When he awakens, Alan continually pronounces his innocence. Romina tries to maintain something of a peace, hearing what Chris has to say and, once it becomes clear that Chris' assumptions might be completely wrong, working to free Alan.

With a single phone call, all of this mystery, intrigue, and moral balancing end. Alan calls Gerald (James Fler), a kind of clean-up man from the world of the landlord's shadier dealings, and Gerald intends to clean up, all right. He sends one gang after another to the house, looking to kill everyone inside.

In other words, the second half of the movie has almost nothing to do with the first, save for the fact that we're watching characters we only partially know and about whom we mostly don't care, as they fight for their lives against wave after wave of Halloween-masked intruders and a biker gang wearing helmets. The characters don't matter, save that they inflict or receive a lot of bodily injury from an assortment of weapons and tools.

It becomes an orgy of graphic and meaningless violence. Flesh is cut. Eyes are gouged. Skulls are crushed. To be fair, Carrer and Eveneshen stage all of the bloody carnage with a firm sense of logistics (where all of these characters are and what they're doing at any given moment), a general feeling of rising risk, and a kind of clever use of the narrow, confined spaces within the house (People keep bumping or falling into things, and one clash in the bathroom has the fighters struggling to find room to move).

One could even be tempted to admire how dedicated the filmmakers become to gimmick, if not the fact that it's so hollow, so pointless, so repetitive, and so completely out of character from how this story began. Questions of morality and justice don't matter when people's lives are in such extreme danger (It is a bit odd how all of our protagonists are so good at and decisive in killing the intruders with such brutality). With those gone, For the Sake of Vicious loses all sense of purpose, except for senseless violence. In retrospect, the title serves as both a clue and a warning.

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