A Thousand Kisses Deep
Directed by Dana Lustig
UK, 2011
Cornerhouse, 24 July 2012
Holding one’s attention throughout is an achievement in itself for a film, and you can chalk that point up here, no worries.
But baseline coherence, or simply making sense, that’s important too. It’s a little bit wobbly in that regard.
A young woman, Mia (Emilia Fox), makes a reckoning with her recently deceased mother – a woman she’d never been especially close to, whose love she’d never felt – by travelling back in time and killing her father. She’d had this man as a lover too, but of course she hadn’t known that he was her father then.
The film is really a reworking or skewering of the Electra myth or complex, and as such it’s an intriguing if rather perplexing work, a treacherous foray into dark fantasy.
When David Warner is in a film, it is always worth a watch, and so it proves here. He plays Max, a venerable gatekeeper, an alchemist of the soul’s journey. Of course the only true philosopher’s stone is found upon a tomb.
