The Trip on Netflix, a Bleak Comedy That Elevates Marital Discord to a Bloody New Level

Netflix’s The Journey is — properly, I used to be going to present the same old spiel about it being a Norwegian black comedy-slash-thriller starring Noomi Rapace (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Prometheus) and directed by Tommy Wirkola of Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters fame, however I’m simply gonna minimize to the chase and say it’s some sick shit. And as most sick shit goes, its smooth-as-guts-in-a-blender-set-on-puree mixture of yucks and yuks could be very a lot a take-it-or-leave-it affair.

THE TRIP: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: For some purpose, The Journey doesn’t open with a loopy scene that’s on the precarious lip of a suspenseful cliff earlier than flashing again to the start — it simply opens in the beginning. How very novel! So, a husband and spouse sit in mattress arguing and the dialog will get fairly nutty and on the market and, as we suspected, they’re simply actors on the set of a cleaning soap opera. Lars (Aksel Hennie) is the director. He chitchats with a co-worker about how he and his spouse are going as much as the cabin this weekend and he stresses repeatedly how she desires to go on a protracted hike into the mountains, and isn’t that harmful? On his approach house, he stops to go to his dad on the nursing house so the outdated man can query his manhood. Then he goes to the {hardware} emporium for a hammer, a hacksaw, some rope and duct tape — , the Serial Killer Particular, $49.95.

He picks up Lisa (Rapace), and the bickering begins instantly. Needling. Irritation. Teensy little digs. Demise by 1,000 cuts on each side. Their skilled lives are awful and the poison’s bled into their private lives. They get to the cabin and as he unloads his assortment of suspicious instruments, the digicam lingers on a cupboard filled with shotguns, and as she mills concerning the kitchen, the digicam will get a lensful of butcher and bread knives. Why? No purpose. Simply the same old stuff you’d discover in a cabin within the Norwegian forest the place you may go looking after which want to chop up the animal you killed.

Lars and Lisa drive one another nuts cooking and consuming dinner, and earlier than mattress they play a recreation of Scrabble that solely additional sledgehammers the wedge between them. The following day, we observe Lars as he fetches the hammer from the basement and heads to the kitchen for 2 belts of booze, and the digicam angle for this shot is canted, oh so very canted. He sneaks up behind Lisa and earlier than he can ballpeen a gap in her cranium she shortly turns round and tases him. It’s most likely protected to say that marital counseling can be pointless at this stage of their relationship.

What Films Will It Remind You Of?: The Struggle of the Røsens! (Yeah, I do know, Røsen is Swedish, not Norwegian. Simply give me this one!)

Efficiency Price Watching: Rapace and Hennie are equally wonderful at enjoying shitty folks, pairing properly like fava beans with a pleasant Chianti.

Memorable Dialogue: Lars will get within the nastiest dig ever (decontextualized to keep away from a spoiler): “Perhaps you’ll be happy now.”

Intercourse and Pores and skin: None, however be warned, there are disturbing scenes of sexual assault.

Our Take: …Then once more, Lars and Lisa do appear to lastly be on the identical web page, homicidal although it might be, so loll that candy and sticky caramel-flavored irony round in your mouth for a minute there. The revelation that they need to kill one another in probably the most literal vogue comes on the 21-minute mark of a 114-minute film, so it’s not a spoiler to say issues escalate from there, by way of a recreation of one-upspersonship that goes from chilly to violent to totally ruthless to extraordinarily violent to repulsive to much more extraordinarily violent to totally difficult to flat-out gory as hell. And sure, different characters become involved, lest it get too repetitive. When you can grasp with it by way of its demented twists and turns — no ensures, find it irresistible or hate it, no deposit no return, mileage might differ, and so forth. — it’ll be to see what decision Wirkola and co-screenwriters Nick Ball and John Niven got here up with, and never since you root for any of those folks, who’re, at greatest, poor examples of the human species.

So I assume which means The Journey exists within the satire realm, the place marital discord is depicted with immense exaggeration and grotesque homicidal impulses are rendered in wealthy, bloody reds. One wonders if Lars and Lisa discover this elevation of confrontation therapeutic, going from passive-aggressive to insanely aggressive, dropping the sniper rifles for a knife battle, typically by no means in a metaphorical vogue. Wirkola often crosses the road between dangerous style (which is nice; assume John Waters) and tastelessness (which is dangerous; assume R-rated Adam Sandler autos), spending nearly all of the finances on burst blood vessels in eyes and viscous strings of varied bodily fluids drooling from mouths and hamburgered knees and innards was out-ards — complete gorebuckets, extra splatter than two or three of these wussy middling slasher motion pictures they make for eight-year-olds as of late, he mentioned, nudge wink grain of salt.

Anyway, the film adheres to the cliche that every one is truthful in love and struggle. It’s amusing and irreverent, bleak and repulsive — and subsequently an train in cognitive dissonance, I assume. It’s positively conceived extra in illness than in well being. For higher or worse. ’Til loss of life by disembowelment or shotgun can we half. I’m gonna cease there.

Our Name: STREAM IT. The Journey is much from nice, and at its greatest, it’s barely good. Nevertheless it evokes just a few choking laughs, it’s difficult in its unpleasantness, and it’s prone to fulfill any iron stomachs who’re as much as the duty.

John Serba is a contract author and movie critic primarily based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Learn extra of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or observe him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The Trip on Netflix