More than any movie in recent memory, the new Aussie shocker Beaten to Death earns the label "torture porn." To a certain breed of buff, that may sound like a ringing endorsement: At last, a return to the gruelingly extreme horror of the 2000s, when films like Hostel, The Devil's Rejects, and the notorious Martyrs pushed the genre's limits of violence and depravity, revealing the dark depths of humanity's capacity to inflict suffering. But those movies also had stories and characters and – in some cases – genuine ideas wedged between their graphic depictions of bodily harm. Beaten to Death, not so much. It's like an experiment to see how much prolonged agony an audience will endure without much at all in the way of context or narrative justification or even a point. It brings to mind Luke Wilson's big speech in Idiocracy: There was a time when we cared whose eyes they were and why they were being gouged.
The film begins in media res, with Jack (Thomas Roach) stumbling bloody and alone across an unforgiving stretch of wilderness. No sooner can we wonder how he got there than the beginning of an answer arrives, as Beaten to Death flashes back 48 hours to find the same unlucky dude on the receiving end of a barbaric pummeling, his wife (Nicole Tudor) dead on the floor in the other room. Meting out the punishment is a hulking fellow who pauses his assault just long enough to deliver a monologue about hazing wimps in the military; this charming anecdote is the closest the film ever comes to character development.
Jack will escape, at least temporarily, the prophecy of the title. But his nightmare in the boonies is just beginning. Going for help, he knocks on the wrong door, passing out of the frying pan and into the fire of unfathomable pain and mutilation. Writer-director Sam Curtain has one inventive, harrowing trick up his sleeve: a ghoulish POV shot that plunges the audience into literal and figurative darkness. Mostly, though, what follows is long scenes of Roach trudging through nature and bellowing in despair, broken up by the periodic, sadistic exacerbation of his character’s predicament.
Thing is, we never learn much of anything about Jack. He has no distinguishing characteristics or personality. Wolf Creek, to which this fellow Outback odyssey owes a plain debt of influence, sensibly took its time endearing us to the hapless lambs it led to the slaughter. Beaten to Death jumps right into the tenderizing, with only a few skimpy flashbacks that tell us next nothing about the livestock whose grim ordeal we're witnessing in great detail.
One of these brief snippets of backstory, a beatifically lit acoustic serenade in a coffee house, has an oddly faith-based vibe. Which makes some sense, given the rather Biblical torments visited upon the movie's whipping-boy hero. Beaten to Death plays a bit like The Passion of the Christ if Jesus were just some guy. Is Jack suffering for sins, his or others’? The one scant source of intrigue in the movie is what, exactly, he did to deserve such a colossal ass-kicking in the first place. The answer, once it finally arrives, is unbelievably anti-climactic; no explanation at all would have been less insulting than the half-assed impression of a crime-doesn't-pay moral that eventually takes shape.
Maybe this all could have worked as pure experiential horror, an immersive survival thriller of the Naked Prey variety, if Curtain's nonlinear structure weren't constantly breaking the tension and killing all momentum. Likewise, there's a way the material could have been played for the darkest of laughs – Jack's luck is so deeply, almost cosmically bad that it verges on absurdist comedy. Beaten to Death, alas, has no sense of humor whatsoever. It's unwaveringly solemn, even melodramatic: All the scenes of Jack wandering and wailing are scored to mournful piano music and intercut with "poetic" images of skies and grass, muted by the desaturated digital cinematography. To be fair, the film is occasionally, unintentionally funny, as when the second of Jack's twisted tormentors (David Tracy) mourns the first with an anguished "He was the best of us!"
The pretensions of seriousness only underscore what a pointlessly gratuitous slog Beaten to Death is. Some of the best horror movies are both difficult to stomach and unexpectedly profound. This one just bludgeons away for 90-odd minutes, hoping that some truth about the human condition might emerge from its nonstop, numbing unpleasantness. The only question it ultimately asks is whether Jack's will to live is stronger than his aversion to pain. Thankfully, the audience's choice is much simpler: Ending his suffering and ours is just a matter of hitting "stop," or never hitting "play" in the first place.
