Sometimes a hard-to-find movie attains a frenzied cult status but ultimately disappoints once you finally track it down and watch it. Trouble Every Day has almost the opposite problem, despite absolutely glowing reviews like this one by Walter Chaw, “Mesmeric and entrancing, intuitive and impossibly intimate, the picture is alive with craft, intelligence, and the absolute courage of its macabre vision. Trouble Every Day is among the finest films of the year, but handle it with care” this dark and bloody vampire tale doesn't seem to be on everyone's lips.
But that's something I expect will change as more and more people happen across reviews and articles – maybe one day it will even be released here on DVD. And it will surely, as word of mouth builds, claim a rightful and honored place in vampire, horror, and strange cinema thanks to its masterful and artful blend of dread punctuated by extreme violence.
In some ways, it's really just a typical vampire story: a man of science travels to a foreign country to find his former colleague and stop him from unleashing the monster they created years before, but it's told in a very irregular fashion – at least for a horror movie. In fact, it's much more in step with contemporary French art house cinema. The film is nearly silent with little or no dialogue and sparse music, and for the first forty minutes or so you're left to decipher what's happening through the beautifully framed actions of the characters alone.
The result is a brooding mystery where each scene escalates the dread and prompts questions like: Who are these hot teenagers hell-bent on breaking into a lone woman's apartment? What are these scientific experiments that were so suddenly abandoned? And why can't Vincent Gallo stop masturbating?
It's a technique that may tax less patient viewers desiring the gore they imagine might come from the trailer instead of moody shots of a scarf fluttering over Parisian rooftops. But more patient viewers need not worry, you'll get blood and lots of it courtesy of the enigmatic and beautiful Beatrice Dalle. Never again will you imagine vampiric bloodletting as a clean, sanitary act, but one of total chaos. The film takes on vampirism as a medical condition, a horrible disease and, as a vampire, her plight is both frightening and sad; in one of her only lines in the film she tells her caretaker/lover that she is ready to die.
Dalle is by far the greatest embodiment of a vampire ever put on screen. She is irresistible, unleashed, uncontrollable, and truly not human. She's a siren of death that makes Hollywood's cloak clad, widow's peaked Dracula look like a joke. Her portrayal of a real-life monster is pure genius and I only wish the film had focused on her just a little more.
Gallo's off kilter performance is right on target as a frotteurist but hard to buy as a research chemist. Still, even for someone who finds him silly (like me), he doesn't ruin it all – even when he and his wife first punctuate the film's prolonged silence with dialogue that sounds like it was over-dubbed by shy children.
There's a pervasive sexuality throughout which, as any symbolist will tell you, is something a good vampire movie ought to have: nearly every scene includes kissing, touching, extreme close ups of skin, masturbating, small French breasts, panty removal and more masturbation, and it's all set to a great soundtrack by Tindersticks (not Frank Zappa).
You may not yet have heard of Trouble Every Day, but if you're a fan of shocking and arty horror cinema, I'll leave it to you to spread the word. You can find the DVD at my favorite place for rare and hard-to-find movies, J4Hi.
But what do you think?