This
cat burglar will steal all the style and atmosphere that isn’t nailed down.
Narrative does not interest her so much, but it hardly matters. Prepare to get
your Irma Vep on with Alice Waddington’s short film Disco Inferno (trailer here), which screens during the 2016 Slamdance Film Festival.
A
woman in a skin tight body suit slinks into a mansion that vaguely brings to
mind Last Year at Marienbad. As she
skulks about some pagan rituals appears to be underway. It is a scene not
unlike Eyes Wide Shut, but with more
goat heads. Any and all cinematic allusions we might suspect are probably intentional.
After all, Waddington (somewhat sheepishly) dedicates the film to Georges
Franju.
Initially,
Disco Inferno looks like a stylistic
mash-up of Bruce Weber and Louis Feuillade until it takes an overtly and
explicitly satanic turn. It seems the grand dame of the ball is Satan herself
and the Vepish figure is a responsible minion come to drag her back to her
sulfuric duties. Then it gets weird.
Does
Disco make sense? Sure, kind of. More
importantly, it looks fabulous and when it crescendos, it gets unsettlingly
creepy (before totally letting us off the hook). Waddington serves as her own
costumer and she certainly gets her money’s worth. Everything about the film
looks rich, particularly Antonio J. García’s lush, fashion-influenced
black-and-white cinematography.
