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Director Pieter Van Hees. Stars : Eline Kuppens, Matthias Schoenaerts, Sien Eggers, Marilou Mermans, Robbie Clieren. 98 mins. Cert : 15 Belgium 2008 Occult Horror / Thriller

DVD Release Date : May 3rd 2010. £14.99 RRP.

Director Pieter Van Hees appears to have been educated at The Lynch / Polanski School of Ominous Cinema. Via creepy yet restrained piano music, foreboding sound design and bizarre imagery (a woman climbing through a hole in her cellar wall), you are unsettled within the first 5 minutes of LEFT BANK….without knowing why.

Eline Kuppens impresses as a downbeat 22 year old Flemish athlete still living with her parents and facing serious health issues - including a weak immune system - that make the professional demands placed upon her increasingly difficult. Urged to rest for a month after passing out, she enters into a swift-moving relationship with a buff young man (Matthias Schoenaerts) who lives in a rough housing estate in the Left Bank area of Antwerp. He gets Kuppens a flat of her own but she slowly gets a bad feeling about her new life direction, beginning with the discovery that the previous tenant vanished without a trace.

En route to a climactic revelation involving what is referred to as “The Diabolic Vagina” - not nearly as perverse as you might think but we‘ll leave you to discover for yourself anyway - the movie sprinkles some titillation (full frontal nudity from both leads and some fairly explicit sex) upon its expertly sustained, slow-burning sense of unease. Van Hees inherits Polanski’s gift (evidenced especially in ROSEMARY’S BABY and THE TENANT) at structuring the story around an accumulation of secondary characters and moments that are ever so slightly sinister.

The first hour is all about the escalation of disquieting details that, as with Mia Farrow in the 1968 Satanic cinema classic, have a devastating effect on an already emotionally / physically troubled protagonist. Schoenaert’s kindly nan seems a tad too kindly. Kuppens begins having strangely disturbing dreams of breast feeding an abandoned baby in the woods. In a jokey nod to the overly friendly antics of Ruth Gordon in ROSEMARY’S BABY, Kuppens’ oddly nervous neighbours start bringing her fruit juice. Newspaper cuttings talk forebodingly of a builder drowning in “black mud” in the building. And a mysterious box bearing the legend “Samhain” shows up, addressed to the previous tenant.

Van Hees’ muted visual style and his consistent avoidance of clichés or cheap scares serve the film extremely well, as does the sympathetic central performance and the restrained use of music and sound. There are shades of Cronenbergian body horror in Kuppens’ developing physical anomalies (a knee injury that turns nasty and weird) but the biggest narrative influence turns out to be from Robin Hardy’s still-haunting THE WICKER MAN as the heroine realises her part in an ancient Celtic tradition designed to keep the land fertile.

Notable by their absence are Polanski’s perfectly honed, mischievous sense of mordant humour and a wrap-up to match the devastating power of Edward Woodward’s terrible fate in the aforementioned Brit flick. Nonetheless, if he struggles to provide a wholly satisfying pay off after such an absorbingly eerie build-up, Van Hees does surprise in the final furlong with a resolution that’s uncharacteristically hopeful for this sub-genre.

Extras (not included on preview disc) : Deleted Scenes / Outtakes ; Production Diary ; Trailers ; Stills and Poster Gallery.

Steven West.

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