Visions of Suffering

Title, promising. Cover image, intriguing. Plot synopsis, very, very alluring. Then you watch it. And your interest fades. And you realize, that you are in the presence of a filmmaker who's not only immature, but is wholly void of confidence in his abilities.

Visions of Suffering is a two-hour music video, but the music is bad. High School student film bad. Its attempts at creating an atmospheric and ominous score are thwarted by the stock sound effects, repetitive queues and really bad Gothic rock. Recently there was a movie made by members of the band Lordi, and in an interview done for Rue Morgue, it was said that "There have been so many examples of how not to do it, if you have a scene with monsters or any villain, if you want to ruin the mood completely, just put (on) some heavy metal." And while I don't particularly care for Lordi's music anyway, the message is more true than I can vouch for.

Sometimes its the juxtaposition of sound and image that creates a great mood, or scene. In the case of VOS, the image hardly stays focused for more than one minute, with a radical jump cut happening every 1-15 seconds, in a ploy to create within the viewer a sense of disjointed nightmare reality. And over these fast choppy images is... fast choppy techno/soundscapes. In the end, all it creates is annoyance.

When you realize the special effects in the movie are amateur at best, you start to think that the jump cutting is an attempt at hiding their poor sfx. But even if you appreciate the sfx, you still have to consider the pointless camera angles, the cheesy color manipulation, the repeated shots of meaningless actions, and bad bad lighting.

It is not good enough to film something "scary" and present it to the viewer and say "isn't this scary?" I can show you a creepy picture of my grandmother eating mincemeat pie and say that, and sure enough, you might think it's creepy at best. But to show it to you repeatedly, with no build up, no suspense, and no logic as to why it's scary, you are simply looking at a grandmother eating mincemeat pie. No sleep lost over that horrifying sight.

Then we come to the white elephant of the film. "Dream Logic". Yes there are "visions" of weird things. Weird things shot in a small forest which, apparently, is the only place these weird things exist in these "visions". Yes, there are waking nightmares and "creepy" old people who say cliché things about vampires and dreams. Yes the story is disjointed and chopped up ala punk rock editing style. But let me ask you this... Why did Freud write so much about dreams and make so much sense as he did so if dreams make no sense at all? Why did Jung devote a life to symbols and mystic psychology if the dreaming subconscious mind has no ebb or flow? If dreams and nightmares are really this nonsensical then these men wasted their life.

I am not saying this movie is a disgrace to these men, not at all. I am saying that this film has no excuse for its lack of coherence. Vampires and Demons have their mythologies and Dreams have their subconscious roots. And to make a film about these things and completely ignore all that, is just plain dumb.

With its half baked philosophy on the waking world and the dreaming mind, its embarrassing use of CGI to describe psychedelic experience, its bad acting, and its fear of revealing itself as shallow and uninspired, this movie is one long excursion of "Isn't this scary?"

"Visions of Suffering" is a vast improvement over "Nails" in every way possible.The plot of this complex surreal piece is pretty hard to follow,but the film is loaded with scenes of hypnotic beauty which contrast with ugly and disturbing horror.I was torn apart from reality and found himself in the world full of nightmares,murders and drugs.The visual effects are very well done and extremely grotesque.The acting is natural and Alexander Shevchenko is outstanding as the tormented main character.I can't believe that such genuinely trippy film was made in Russia,where independent filmmakers are not respected.A hallucinogenic nightmare.9 out of 10.

Andrey Iskanov is one of my favorite directors, his films are his own, he has so much style and mostly it works. This is definitely scary, and it's hard not to get sucked into it. The effects are decent, the film itself is very creepy and dreamy, as it is ultimately about our nightmares filtering into reality when it's raining. The darkness and sadness of rain opens our souls up to our inner demons slipping into consciousness

When it rains the dreams arrive and the realization that blood sucking vamps get into your dreamscape and give visions of the worst suffering. Very believable story.

Visions of Suffering is the purest definition of "style over substance" that I can really think of. There's not much of a plot, and what there is of one is pretty... uh... stupid (some nonsense about vampires, drugs, dreams, goth chicks, and a broken telephone). But you don't watch a film like this for the plot -- it's all about the imagery, right? So, yeah, if you watch this film for its imagery, you're probably going to enjoy yourself -- it's EASILY the most insane movie ever made. Honestly, I thought a lot of the images were brilliant, though about half of them were cheesy (maybe intentionally?) in a seriously "Look how many VST plugins I have on my DV editing program!" kind of way. Note the images themselves aren't bad, it's some of the cheesy filters the director puts them through. Unfortunately, we're probably going to be seeing a lot more of this in the future from other young independent directors...

Really, at two hours and six minutes, the film feels about two times as long as it should be, and the initial shock of what you're seeing starts to turn to annoyance at around the half-way mark. Especially that strobe light -- god, turn that thing off. I can safely say most of it wasn't boring, but a LOT of fat could have been excised, mainly all the shots in the rave. On the other hand, I have to give points to the shockingly effective gore and some hilarious dialogue. And despite some of the cheese in the images, there are some that are unbelievable: one shot near the end of a 3D scythe and a man's testicles blew me away. And that's all I'll say about that...

So, long story short: This film is nothing like El Topo or whatever other films this has been compared to, it's not an "art cult film", it's NOT Lynch-like (I swear, every somewhat weird or somewhat experimental film on IMDb gets called "Lynch-like")... it's more of a bedroom DV experiment with a lot of interesting shots and a lot of silly effects. This film could have been brilliant if a good 30 minute chunk of it was taken out. As it is, it's occasionally genius, oftentimes disturbing, but usually only mildly interesting. It's a film you'll never forget, though, which offers kind of a contradiction: after the movie is over, you will say, "That was the most messed-up film I've ever seen!" for sure, but you won't really remember what made it so messed up. It's just a constant onslaught of visuals and weird sounds, but it too offers something of a contradiction. If the point of the director was to make a bunch of insane visuals, why even waste time with the silly storyline and characters? There are just a few too many elements at work here to be able to define this film as "good"... so, don't go in expecting a "good" film, but if you want to see something more messed-up than Begotten, Pinnochio 964, Tetsuo, Happiness of the Katakuris, and Holy Mountain COMBINED (though, again, it's not really like any of those movies), you should check this out. Definitely worth one watch though I highly doubt even fans of this would want to pop it back in for a bunch of repeated viewings.