The Seasoning House Review

rating: 4

Most films are a passive experience. They require little thought, little engagement, little effort on the part of the audience. They€™re entertainment, pure and simple, often part of a night out, a socially acceptable way for you and your significant other to sit quietly in the dark, tolerating each other€™s company. You lay your money on the counter, you buy your gallon of fizzy corn syrup, your bucket of popcorn and your stale nachos spaffed with bright industrial yellow cheese (that€™s a lotta corn you€™re consuming, by the way€), you slump in your seat and you let the film wash over you. A couple of hours later you stumble, blinking like a mole, back into the light, your wallet several pounds lighter, your gut several pounds heavier and your senses numbed by watching robots knock seven shades out of each other or talking animals caper or vampires with teen angst and nice hair. The Seasoning House is not one of those films. A visceral, bruising experience closer to being chased up an alley and given a refreshing kicking than a Saturday night at the movies, watching The Seasoning House is a lot like watching a three-lane motorway pile-up; there€™s a bleak, breathtaking beauty to the carnage and no matter how much you want to look away, you can€™t, won€™t. Nor should you because while the film itself is fiction, the atrocities it depicts are very real and happened just a decade and a half ago in what is now the new stag and hen capital of Europe. Set in the Balkans towards the end of the civil war, deaf and mute teenager Angel (Rosie Day) is kidnapped and sold into sex slavery at a grimy brothel by some local militia led by Goran (Sean Pertwee), who murder her family and wipe out her village whilst cheerfully enjoying a spot of ethnic cleansing of an afternoon. Spared the fate of most of the other girls when the owner, Viktor (Kevin Howarth), takes a shine to her and keeps her for himself, Angel is forced to care for her less fortunate fellow captives; cooking, cleaning, bathing them and keeping them docile by doping them with smack. Relatively free within the confines of the brothel, she makes use of the building€™s crawlspaces and ventilation ducts to spy on the €˜customers€™ as they rape and abuse the drugged, often bound women. But when Goran and his men visit the brothel for a some R€™n€™R and her only friend, Vanya (Dominique Provost-Chalkley), is raped to death, Angel seizes her chance both for revenge and for escape and a brutal, bloody fight for survival ensues. Almost unrelentingly bleak, The Seasoning House is a raw, angry film that serves up bleak truths with its genre thrills, delivering a tight, economical, breathlessly exciting B-movie that€™s both harrowing and powerful, playing like Home Alone meets Salò, while exposing the everyday horrors of the sex trafficking trade and the almost matter of fact atrocities that were committed on a daily basis at the heart of Europe (just two hours flight-time from London), that we as an international community turned a blind eye to in the Nineties and are still dealing with the legacy of. The confident, assured feature debut of British special effects wizard Paul Hyett, the gore and action in The Seasoning House are as shocking and realistic as you€™d expect but what€™s more surprising is the subtlety and restraint of his direction, focussing more on the characterisation of his protagonists, the shifting power dynamics of their relationships and the creeping build of tension before exploding into violence, the lighting and shooting of the titular seasoning house like a Hogarthian vision of Hell. The performances are excellent. The ever reliable Sean Pertwee delivers yet another loathsomely repellent villain, his Goran a believable human monster with no redeeming features, while Kevin Howarth brings a sllky seductiveness as well as brutality to lovelorn sociopathic pimp Viktor. The true revelation however is 19-year-old Rosie Day who is quite simply stunning as victim-turned-avenging Angel, acquitting herself admirably during the film€™s action scenes while delivering a quietly devastating, measured, mature performance that kicks you in the soul. While I hesitate to say I enjoyed The Seasoning House (and I€™d give anyone who did a wiiiiiiiiiiiiide berth), it€™s a thoughtful, intelligent, bleakly nasty film that gets under your skin and refuses to be ignored. The Seasoning House is released in UK cinemas from Friday.