When
it comes to awkward mornings-after, the women of Sex and the City have nothing on this cat. The mystery man comes to
in a pit filled with corpses, suffering from a nasty case of amnesia. It will
not get any easy for our confused chap in Gonzalo López-Gallego’s Open Grave (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York and is already available on VOD.
Having
no idea how he came to be in such a grisly state, the man is understandably
alarmed. However, a silent woman with a
deer-in-the-headlights look in her eyes throws him a rope. Searching for his savior, the man who will
eventually come to be called Jonah makes his way to an ominous looking country
house, where he meets the woman and four other people who also have amnesia.
Given
his gore streaked appearance, suspicion automatically falls on him and he will
never really shake it, at least as far as the hot-headed Lukas is concerned. The mute woman seems to know better, but
unfortunately she cannot talk and only writes in her native Chinese. In rather short order, the strangers will
encounter an external threat that ought to bring them together, but naturally
has the opposite effect.
Frankly,
it is too bad the film tips its hand so early, because the four amnesiacs and
mute set-up is an intriguing genre premise.
As it happens, every subsequent revelation turns out to be a
let-down. While the U.S. Military is not
directly responsible for their predicament, when America’s uniformed men and
women finally arrive, López-Gallego and the Borey Brothers screenwriters, Eddie
& Chris, sadly chose to depict them as a pack of thugs, which is both a
disappointment and a cliché.
On
the plus side, Grave has Hong Kong
A-lister Josie Ho as the mute woman. She is tremendously expressive in a role
with no dialogue, but a good deal of screen time. Sharlto Copley (co-star of Neill Blomkamp’s
hit District 9 and his
career-threatening flop Elysium) is
also impressively twitchy and scruffy as Jonah, whereas Thomas Kretschmann
takes it somewhat over the top as Lukas, but not horrendously so by genre
standards.
