Think about all the things that would be difficult to do if you no longer had sight: Run. Climb. Avoid barbed wire.
All these are encountered by the protagonist of Sam Curtain’s Beaten to Death, a jarring Australian film that packs 48 hours of hell into a tight 92 minutes. Prepare to feel pummeled.
Barely surviving an assault his wife does not, the horrifically injured Jack (Thomas Roach of Curtain’s Blood Hunt) seeks help in rural Tasmania. The first person he comes across, Ned (newcomer David Tracy), an imposing side of beef, drives Jack back to retrieve his dead spouse. There, Ned sees the man Jack was forced to kill in self-defense: Ned’s brother. Awkward!
To say Ned hungers for vengeance — and gets it — is an understatement, as Jack spends much of the time blindfolded, bloodied and muddied. While Beaten to Death isn’t a case of wall-to-wall violence, its many sequences of brutality certainly knock those walls down. If any piece of Curtain’s movie will live in infamy, it’s going to be the most immersive ocular-trauma shot the screen has witnessed. Prepare to wince and cringe.
Reliance on the sparse outdoors gives the film a mythic quality. In fact, remove the smartphones, cars and other minor bits of set dressing and it’s not hard to imagine this tale taking place in the Old West, whether in a spaghetti Western or from the pages of Jonah Hex. To his credit, Curtain chops up the timeline so certain aspects of the story aren’t revealed right away. We don’t need to immediately see this cat-and-mouse survival thriller’s ignition point to get caught in its considerably tangled net. —Rod Lott