Skolimowski: Essential Killing (2010)

Minimal, terse and largely silent, Essential Killing opens in the Middle East, where an Arabic soldier (Vincent Gallo) blows up a couple of American troops. He’s promptly captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Europe, where he escapes just as promptly, and is forced to fend for himself in the snowy wilds. The majority of the film plays out as his attempt to evade both his pursuers and the vicissitudes of his environment, and although there are overtones of survival drama, it’s more like an endurance drama – there’s no doubt, really, of the soldier’s inability to survive in this terrain, especially as he accrues injuries, so it’s just a matter of seeing how long he can last before he finally, inevitably reaches his limit. From that perspective, and given the brutal interrogation scenes that precede his escape, it perhaps belongs more with torture porn than with survival drama – there’s the same fascination with the human body in extremis, and the peculiar mindfulness it can bring. As a result, Gallo’s performance is little more than the sheer fact of him being placed in this terrain, under these conditions – and Skolimowski films things so as to leave no doubt of Gallo’s actual endurance and suffering. That might not work with another actor, but there’s a masochistic intensity to Gallo’s catatonic acting style that’s perfect for a role that simply demands him to be a placeholder for blank suffering; like some of the most powerful and self-abnegating performance artists, he tends to endure the camera rather than act to it. And that means that the film works best when it’s shot from Gallo’s perspective, rather than actually including him in the frame. At those moments, his performance and presence contains the film, which doesn’t proceed so much as erode, Skolimowski impoverishing it until it’s no more than the fact of Gallo’s suffering, putting the sting back into war.