Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes

Contemporary horror cinema is drowning in '80s retro gore and '90s VHS schlockalikes. But in those two eras, if you really were pushing hard to be an edgy alternative cineaste, what you were really watching was '60 and '70s Eurosleaze. Oddly, there's been a surprising lack of films riffing on directors like Jean Rollin and Mario Bava, with their psychosexual nightmares that were half art house pretension, half grindhouse titillation.

German microbudget chiller Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes begins with all the ingredients of a Rollin classic - a small cast, a borrowed mansion house, something vaguely unnerving happening in the background, and a lot of stylish cinematography. Indeed, it would be harder for the cast t to be smaller, with Dieter (von Lüttichau) and Margot (Taraz ) rattling around the abandoned castle that she's been left by a relative. The tension between the two is flesh-flaying, and that's even before he finds a bullwhip in a strange old trunk. The way he winds it, with a slickening grin, is a seeming nod to Bava's BDSM (the "s" stands for supernatural) ghost story The Whip and the Body, both at odds and totally in keeping with his straight laced businessman persona, preening and pretentious as he inspects the property he clearly loathes: but then, he loathes everything about Margot, and she's equally far from enamored of him. The longer they stay, the more logic seems to evaporate, and the dust-laden air of the rotting manse begins to infect their brains.

It's a fitting imitation of the era's films, including the descent into high camp/high Gothic nonsensical non sequiturs. "I don't get the ending," Dieter says, but he is no longer Dieter. He's Klaus, the actor playing Dieter in Our Eternity in this Castle, the film within the film being directed by a husband-and-wife couple: mousy scriptwriter Eva (Platen) and self-obsessed director Gregor (Wilbusch). They are truly the voices that the duo within the film within the film have been hearing, their own relationship issues parlayed into the plot - purposefully by Eva, and obliviously by Gregor. This is where Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes becomes most textured, convoluted, cryptic, intriguing, and obtuse. If the film-within-a-film recreates the on-the-nose symbolism and broad performances that defined Eurosleaze, this on-set narrative has a kitchen sink drama edge, as Eva subtly snipes at her husband as he bulldozes over her script and feelings. But there's more than just a pullback to provide context here: new layers are revealed, new threads interweave, as Eva's inner fantasy - her rewrites of the draft of her life - intrude, and then uncanny influences starts to pervade events.

The disconnect between in camera and on set is less like the two halves of Rollin's Rape of the Vampire and closer to a more torrid, violent version of the endlessly sweet on-set comedy, One Cut of the Dead, interwoven with the collapsing sanity of the ne plus ultra of Eurohorror metariffs, Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio. If you get all those references, then you're probably the ideal audience for Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes, able to add the footnotes to its narrative. But while that intellectual diversion may be entertaining, it should be the story alone, with its commentary on how supposedly progressive artistes aren't necessarily any closer to the avant garde of emotional revolutions than the bourgeoisie they lampoon. However, director Kevin Kopacka (Hager) concentrates so much on making the disintegrating levels of reality coherent that the character and plot development is a little thin, especially with the film's 76 minute run time (half an hour of which is the film-within-the-film). Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes may not have as much to say as you might hope, but what it does it recites with an enthralling elegance.

Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes is available on VOD now.