The Ape (2009)

The Ape is one of the most unsettling movies I've seen in a long time. This is not because of the explicit violence that the film features, but that it is so unclear what is really going on. The churning machinery takes us to a hellish place. The film takes me places but I'm not sure where. From the get-go I learn that something is deeply wrong with the main character, a weary-looking guy called Krister. He's a driving instructor and we sense that this guy is going to explode, or is what we see some kind of gruesome aftermath to events we haven't seen? Gruesome things follow and the film follows them, well, quietly. I end up feeling shellshocked, unable to take it all in. The film works as a dream, and so images are so startling that now, thinking back, I cannot really recall them other than as a fuzzy memory, like the memory of a dream. As with regard to dreams, I can't piece things together. I remember an atmosphere, a car. What makes Jesper Ganslandt's The Ape such a strange viewing experience is that somehow places me in a zombie-like mode where I witness really violent stuff as if in a state of half-sleep. All the time, when I watch the man's harried and scared face, I can't make myself ask the relevant psychological questions (what the hell, why the hell, etc.). I just watch. Or: the film does not elicit watching, it elicits squinting, a sort of horror that is expressed in glimpses, rather than a full-blown disclosure or revelation.