Aaron Schimberg's Go Down Death is a curious and confounding journey into a delirious and truly unique world full of macabre, sadness, disease, and philosophizing. Far more interested in delivering a lingering atmosphere than concise narrative, Go Down Death offers a disjointed film that is essentially strung together by a series of vignettes, following a group of fatalistic inhabitants living in a decrepit small town, many years in the past. These characters include two soldiers in a fog-soaked forest, a tense card game among a group of roughneck type characters in a brothel, and a post-coital conversation among a man and a prostitute, among others, as Schimberg offers one of the most unique forays into the bizarreness of myth and folklore, examining the relationship it has with shaping culture and society. Featuring beautiful, black-and-white photography that would make Guy Maddin proud, Go Down Death presents an imaginatively bleak world, with the filmmakers effectively juxtaposing the ugliness and sadness of many of these townsfolk with beautiful imagery. Much of the film features scenes that feel more like a stage play, as one or two characters simply converse, waxing poetic about various aspects of life. Go Down Death gleefully uses its old-timey setting and cast of eccentric characters to deliver a very unique perspective on mortality, juxtaposing the old with the new in a startling final sequence that fast-forwards to a contemporary dinner party in Brooklyn. This sequence is what really helps make the film cohesive, with Schimberg capturing how these two very different societies - modern day Brooklyn & this relic town of the past, each share their same sense of mortality, each longing for happiness, despite any specific social norms around them. Complex, confusing, and tedious at times, Aaron Schimberg's Go Down Death is a film I cannot help but appreciate given its unique perspective, but there is no question it is likely only to be enjoyed by the most adventurous of viewers.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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