You Love to See It: The Loved Ones (Patreon)

The Loved Ones, an out-of-nowhere Australian abduction flick from the otherwise deeply mediocre Sean Byrne, is plenty grisly. Power drills, razor blades, syringes full of bleach and boiling water — it has all the trappings of ultraviolent slashers like Wolf Creek, but where that film employs mystery and a slow-burn setup to juice its vicious tooth-and-nail back half, The Loved Ones turns instead to moments of upsetting mundanity. The defining scene to this approach is when Lola attempts to drill through Brent’s skull, her wet-eyed and hapless serial killer father carefully guiding her through a process it’s clear he expects her to continue after he’s no longer around to orchestrate it. At the critical moment, when the drill bit shreds through flesh and meets solid bone, it skips off of the skull and Lola squeals in surprised frustration.

This little gaffe, followed by a fatherly lecture on the need to hold the power tool firmly, makes Brent’s maiming so much harder to watch than it might otherwise have been. A person is doing this to him, a person so thoroughly ruined by her parent that this is her childhood’s equivalent to learning how to bake, or how or to change a tire. It shows the fragility of the web of behavior and belief we spin from generation to generation, the neutrality of love and attention as a gift given to our children, and the far-reaching effect of grief’s tremors. It’s Lola’s little blunders — her inexperience with the drill, her hesitation when it comes time to pour boiling water in the hole in Brent’s skull — that humanize her and thus render the film’s violence personal, dripping with the slime of malformed but recognizable motivations.

There’s a simple symmetry to the film’s structure, a mirroring of loss’s ravages and brutality’s careful, loving cultivation, of closeness and alienation revolving around one another like celestial bodies. From a crushing prom night lost in a haze of alcohol and grief to the mutilated Brent’s flight back to his mother’s arms, The Loved Ones touches isolation and belonging without a shred of sentiment, stripping back our romanticized obsession with love, loyalty, and happiness to show their ultimate inadequacy in the face of life’s violent contradictions.