A Serbian nightmare.

by B Thornton- Harwood

After several weeks of A Serbian Film sat on my hard drive, a few days ago I finally took the plunge and watched it.

I decided I had to see what all the fuss was about after reading several horrified Facebook statuses just after Christmas, but there were a couple of reasons it took me so long to actually view this particular movie. Firstly none of my house mates would watch with me and I thought it’d be a bit creepy to watch a faux-snuff/porno on my own, secondly from what I’d read about it I’d need said house mates to hold me in the fetus position upon completion of the 110 minutes.

However, the horror did not live up to what my imagination had created.

The basic plot is an ex-pornstar, Miloš, is roped into doing an experimental blue movie by an artsy director. But when he tries to pull out of production due to the extreme nature of the film he’s pumped to the eyeballs with horse Viagra and let loose on all manner of orifices. The result is Miloš finds himself in violent and often very illegal illicit acts, all of which are supposedly representing the Serbian government’s treatment of their own people.

Now don’t get me wrong the film is horrific on a whole host of levels, made worse by the fact that the director Srdjan Spasojevic had over four minutes cut by the BBFC, and I can only imagine what that contained, but it is a work of fiction, and should therefore be looked at as such.

There are videos all over the internet that are, in my eyes, worse than anything depicted in A Serbian Film, videos that are not a work of fiction but made for the genuine purpose of sexual gratification.

Overall A Serbian Film can’t be called anything less than vile, but it’s nothing compared to the vomit inducing shock videos that a simple Google search will provide you with on a night in, which will almost inevitably leave you hugging your knees rocking back and forth in a cold shower, wishing your could unsee whatever it was the Japanese girl was subjected to.