Brutal is a tragic love story about two ultra violent serial killers who are looking for love and find it just a little too late.  Unknown to one another The Woman and The Man, hunt and brutally murder members of the opposite sex in a visceral search something unobtainable. When these predators cross paths, each thinking the other is prey, they engage in a bloody battle that leads to revelations for both the characters and the viewer.

I actually watched this movie a few days ago and I’m just not getting around to reviewing it. I have to say, Brutal was just what the doctor ordered after a stressful Christmas season. It was bloody, violent, disturbing, and even managed to pack a couple laughs in along the way. The performances are solid, I dig the cinematography style, and the practical effects were superb. The story really doesn’t rear its head until the third act but when it does it makes all the insanity of the first two acts make some kind of sense.

Brutal manages to be more than another torture porn flick. I didn’t need it to be anything more than ultraviolence and gore but it was. Its an interesting look at madness and the ill effects of sexual repression in society. Sure, it’s an extreme example but it is still apt. Most of the more prominent serial killers have some sort of sexual repression in their history and it is almost always cited as a reason that they ended up with a well-publicized body count. The same can be said for The Man and The Woman. By the end of the film both of these people who were shown to be depraved predators almost become sympathetic characters. There is some smart writing and directing under the buckets of blood and pots full of people soup.

While it was a pretty good movie, there were scenes in Brutal that I thought were just plain awesome. There’s a clip in the trailer of The Man holding a severed head that it looking around and smiling. In the movie, he is sitting there having a philosophical conversation with this severed head which ends in The Man stomping said head to mush with his bare foot. There is also a scene where The Man gets the shit kicked out of him by an intended victim then uses a couple of big ass knives to climb up her body. I know that sounds weird but imagine a person using knives to climb up snow or ice or something except for it’s a guy dragging himself up another person. Shortly after that, he sinks a butcher knife into this chick’s heel which manages to be one of the most painful looking scenes in the movie. That is surprising because The Woman is a savage badass in her own right. She does a metric shit ton of dick stabbing. The climactic battle between the two is a thing of beauty but you’ll need to see it to truly understand.

All in all, would I recommend this movie? Yeah. If you’re into blood, gore, and violence I really think you’ll dig this one. Go hunt it down and you can see for yourself why the title is so fitting.

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