Directed by Brendan Muldowney. Starring Darren Healy, Nora Jane-Noone. Ireland 2009, 84 mins Certificate : 18 Genre : Revenge Thriller.

Release Date 14th March 2011. High Fliers Films. DVD RRP £12.99

A few years ago, Frightfest showcased writer-director Brendan Muldowney’s THE TEN STEPS, a subtly terrifying ghost story that, within its taut ten minute framework, displayed considerable technical savvy while delivering more chills than most movies can manage in 90 minutes. It single-handedly justified the continued existence of short film slots in movie festivals. Muldowney’s feature debut is a different kind of harrowing : following HEARTLESS, CHERRY TREE LANE, EDEN LAKE and HARRY BROWN, it’s a revenge flick exploiting the tabloid-engineered paranoia about our brutal society and the callous youths that dominate it. Authentically shot and set in an oppressive modern day Dublin, it’s one of the stand-out films of its growing sub-genre.

Freelance press photographer Darren Healy (well cast and superb) is accustomed to documenting the scummier side of his city but leads a lonely personal existence revolving around an ailing elderly Dad and bolstered by a budding relationship with sympathetic care worker Nora Jane-Noone (one of the most memorable actresses from THE DESCENT). Just as Muldowney has established Dublin as an urban Hell rife with leery drunks, zoned-out addicts, hostile tramps and intimidating hoodies, Healy is brutally assaulted and castrated in an alley by knife-wielding teenagers. The attack scars him physically and emotionally, giving him tinnitus, turning him paranoid and prompting a Travis Bickle-style head-shaving. While doctors and shrinks strive to make him feel like a real man again, Healy begins preparing for retribution : he joins a gym, participates in self-defence classes, acquires Steroids from shady Polish body-builders and buys useful, illegal weapons from the internet.

Though it provokes its audience into despising the street-scum responsible for Healy’s actions and winds up with an in-your-face bloodbath, SAVAGE is far from a simplistic, Fascistic latter-day DEATH WISH. Muldowney is far more indebted to more troubling, complex revenge movies like TAXI DRIVER and STRAW DOGS than he is the crowd-pleasing Michael Winner cycle. Key to its impact is Healy’s vivid, haunting portrayal of an emasculated man’s efforts to feel whole again : the actor conveys the ordinary, unlucky bloke’s transition from self-pitying victim to enraged would-be crusader with real conviction. Muldowney ensures the transition is far from comfortable : it comes with small moments of distressing personal horror (witness an uneasy masturbation scene) and a sense of pervasive hopelessness that quickly rules out the guilty-pleasure climactic triumph of your typical exploitation movie.

The movie bows out with an image that’s as visceral as they come, but it‘s a terrifying one at the end of a very unglamorous and troubling journey. A turning-point sequence involving the horrific killing of a sheep represents the moment where Healy becomes as much of a figure of fear and callous savagery as his original attackers. The revenge, when it happens, is ugly, terrifying and futile : we’re a long, long way from Charles Bronson territory here, and you will flinch at the hardcore bloodshed in the closing minutes. SAVAGE could have done without the sporadic, obvious chapter titles appearing at appropriate intervals to announce things like “Anger” and “Revenge” but otherwise it doesn’t put a foot wrong. Its depiction of one man’s all too credible descent into brutality may be tonally light years away from the quiet terror of THE TEN STEPS but that unforgettable short film’s directorial promise has been fulfilled.

Steven West.

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