Foul Evil Deeds [+lee también:
entrevista: Richard Hunter
ficha de la película] - the first feature film by young British director Richard Hunter, which was presented in the Locarno Film Festival’s Cineasti del Presente competition - revolves around seemingly banal characters who decide to succumb to their darker side and commit socially reprehensible acts. The title itself sums up the film’s intention perfectly, presenting it to the audience as an incisive and astonishing overview of socially objectionable acts, without ever exploring their consequences. Consequently, at the end of the film, the audience is left with a multitude of questions to which it finds no answers. What the director is most interested in here is showing who is hiding behind the “monster” (these monsters are actually nothing more than men, potentially an unwitting criticism of toxic masculinity?), what exactly has driven these characters to commit their crimes, and where we can find the human contingent who are fighting against the darker side in all of us.

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Foul Evil Deeds is a collection of seemingly trivial stories which slowly and in delectable and perverse fashion reveal the dark side of the schizophrenic human race as it suddenly loses control. Human cruelty is shown without filter, and the film becomes a laboratory where the director manipulates his characters as if they were puppets. This macro-portrait of mankind with cruel overtones allows Hunter to subjectively study and observe human behaviour without actually judging it, leaving the audience free to draw its own conclusions.

The film is composed of six stories about men who have done wrong, six men who have more or less voluntarily yielded to their darker side: there’s a man who has just got out of prison, is working as a cleaner and is sick and tired of the monotony of his life which is slowly annihilating him, a seemingly jovial father who ”inappropriately touches” a colleague, an accountant who vents his desire for submission with a dominatrix, with a bouquet of flowers in his hand, a teenager who leaves his girlfriend to have a good time with his friends who subsequently play a joke on him with tragic repercussions, a (presumably Anglican) pastor who finds a dead mouse in his attic and finds himself contending with involuntary “animal-slaughter” and far more, and, objectively the most chilling act, a lawyer who picks up his son from school before returning to his luxurious apartment to look after his “momentarily absent” wife.

Marked by an unmistakeably English sense of humour which is both cruel and hilarious, Foul Evil Deeds catapults the audience into the banality of life as it turns into a living hell and takes them on an unexpected journey into the darkness of the mind, in the border zone where good can turn into evil, humanity into inhumanity. Also shot on mini DV, just like a home video, Hunter’s film transforms the audience into voyeurs, into observers of the private lives of characters who would definitely have preferred to act in the shadows. This voluntarily vintage, nostalgic and underground aesthetic turns the film into an aesthetically destabilising and dependency-inducing experience. It’s hard to describe or classify (and maybe this is its strength), but Foul Evil Deeds stays with us like a lascivious thought which we know is wrong but which we have no intention of abandoning.

Foul Evil Deeds was produced by WAYE.