Freeze Me

I watched this movie with no knowledge of what the story was about. The director did a very good job developing suspense right from the start. When I found out about the plight of Chihiro, I automatically felt for her. Because of what happened, its effect is so traumatizing that she's virtually helpless to do anything. When push comes to shove, Chihiro has the "fight or flight" choice and it's interesting to see what choice she makes. I must commend Harumi Inoue who gave a really great performance. She truly displayed fear, confusion, paranoia well and I felt really concerned for her character. Hey, if a movie made me feel that strong, I think it got it successfully got its message across.

"Freeze Me" depicts intense violence and I don't mean like cheesy Hollywood does. It deals with violence against women which sadly is not fictional in society. The story takes a trippy twist towards the end and watch the character progression thoughout the film. I must say that Harumi Inoue is stunningly beautiful and was great to watch. She's definitely got a new fan!

Rape revenge flick is just so quirky I don't even know what I thought of it.

Half way through this I found myself wondering what genre it was. Was it a horror? No, because it wasn't gruesome or scary enough. Was it a drama? No, because there was nowhere near enough depth to the story. Was it a thriller? No, because there was hardly any sense of thrills or tension on display.

This stumbling block is always going to be a huge problem. If you cannot classify a story under a specific category, or indeed multiple ones, then it becomes very hard to understand what kind of mindset to watch it in. If it's a thriller then it gets your pulse racing and you instantly 'activate' the mental recesses to put you into that frame of mind so you'll get the most out of it. Likewise horror, and one prepares oneself to be scared or disgusted or whatever. It's like real life - you're not going to elicit any inappropriate emotion for a given situation. You want to panic when you're being chased by a lion, not when you're settling down for a relaxing evening with your wife/husband.

With this, I was simply baffled as to how to feel.

Chihiro is a young lady who appears to have it all; a good job, an impending marriage to a man she's deeply in love with, and a solid social circle of friends. Indeed, she's in absolute bliss.

However, when a man she seems to recognise shows up at her apartment block, she runs from him in a state of panic, and a flashback of a scene from a home movie where the man's eyes dominate the picture appears. Evidently, she knows this man, and is terrified of him. Running back to her apartment she tries to get away from him, but he sticks to her like glue and takes over her home.

Essentially, it's safe to say that he (Kojima) is someone from Chohiro's past who she hoped never to see again.

That would be a synopsis and sets the stall for the movie. Well, so you would think. The problem I have with this review is the movie has very little content. Basically rapist #1 shows up, gets killed by the vilified woman, then his buddy shows up and the same happens, then the last one. And to store the bodies of these perps? Chohiro buys industrial freezers.

And that's it.

Obviously, there's an ending here, but you can see it coming a mile off and the events leading up to it are also as inevitable.

The major flaw with this movie is there are simply no layers to it. It's uninteresting because it never makes anything happen.

There's just so little plot that it makes rating it impossible, plus the added fact that it even adopts comedy at one point shows how completely directionless it actually is.

It's shallow, vacuous, and devoid of meat. However, it *is* different, and is extremely quirky as a result, which I must give it credit for.

However, add some overwrought rape scenes to the mix and you finish this movie entirely confused as to what you made of it.

I think more could have been done with the idea, and plenty more to make it plausible. Which is another flaw; to say you have to suspend your disbelief is an understatement. It's just absolutely incredible how daft much of this is. So many things happen which seem to abandon logic entirely, and they don't even succeed in entertaining given how utterly daft they are. You find yourself asking just why she is acting the way she is, why she is doing what she is doing.

Is it entertaining? Dunno. I suppose it killed (pardon the pun) a couple of hours but really, it was just so narrow.

Strange.

Some films are made that test society's underlying beliefs, and this is one of them. some would say that the women in such a circumstance should call the police (as i would advocate also in every case), but sometimes with some people, pride and society may lead to people hiding. This is the case with Chihiro, who on being gatecrashed by her attackers, is afraid to lose her life once again by revealing what happened to her.

It tests our attitude to the victims in such circumstances, and makes you think. You see the film from the victims point of view... and in that way, for those willing to see a film that tests their minds, then this is a film for you. Outstanding and frightening movie that deserves to be watched..

At the start of the millennium, exploitation movies were few and far between. Films such as I Spit On Your Grave, The Last House On The Left and The Virgin Spring had left the subgenre with little room to breathe. Unsurprising then, that Takashi Ishii briefly moved away from the exploitation genre that dominated his early works and directed Gonin, making him an international name. His films have always been largely preoccupied with revenge, and Freezer was to be no exception. Whereas Irreversible, released two years later, drew critical acclaim mainly for not glorifying the life that had been destroyed but to mourn it, Freezer was first to shift the focus from gory revenge and concentrate on the victim as she struggled to cope with the memories she thought she had buried deep inside her. Irreversible may be more celebrated, but Freezer also demands your attention. Without ever glorifying the horrific acts that fuel Chirhiro's bloody vengeance, Freezer is, for the most part, well-paced and surprisingly beautiful, with a compelling and intensely dramatic performance from its lead. DW

The rape-revenge genre is rife with dodgy exploitation pics and under-the-counter sleaze, with I Spit On Your Grave (Day of the Woman) being the most (in)famous and, possibly, the most misogynistic. Artistic merit is not something the rape-revenge film concerns itself with (let's face it, 'Last House on the Left' is a crude, artless fluke), concentrating more on graphic sex / nudity for graphic sex / nudity's sake. Oh, and the rape has to be really horrible to justify the rapists' sticky end (no pun intended).

If you're watching a good example of the genre, you'll be putting yourself in the place of the woman and relating to her, something the horror genre frequently does (it's one of the only genres where men will relate to a woman) and wishing her attackers dead - in any way possible, not necessarily in a sensationalist way.

I think Freeze Me (or Freezer, here in the UK) succeeds in this, as the plight of the female character is always put first. Agreed, there are a lot of gratuitous shots of her naked body, but these act as a reminder to her beauty and frailty. When it comes to the rape, it is often more implied and in no way staged to be titillating, something the more dubious examples try to achieve, rather disturbingly.

Freeze Me, therefore, isn't exactly an enjoyable experience (I'll have to look up the word 'entertainment'), but it is thought-provoking, well-made on a very tight budget, and incredibly disturbing. One of the best examples of this horror sub-genre.