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By Adam Blampied.

Not ten seconds ago, The ABCs of Death finished and for many minutes I lay motionless on my sofa, foetal, wrapped in blankets, contemplating the mewling nightmare that had just kicked open the front doors to my brain and announced in vaguely-subtitled Japanese that I didn’t live there anymore.

I do not know what I have just seen.

Just to claw my attention away from the bleeding wound that is the film’s actual contents, let me tell you about the format. That at least I can begin to describe in human words. Producers Ant Thompson and Tim League approached 25 directors from all over the globe and gave them each a letter of the alphabet and five thousand dollars. The directors were then tasked with creating a short film each about Death, the title of which was to begin with their assigned letter. These 25 films – and a 26^th chosen from submissions from the public, – have been sewn together with a rusty needle and human hair into the anthology piece that is The ABCs of Death or as I like to call it, Slaughter, Je T’Aime. It’s a fantastic gimmick and the sheer volume of variety here (not just of filmmaking style, but of personal directorial taste) tempts me to give it a default recommendation, just because it’s such a curio. But that would be wrong of me.

Ok, back to the film’s actual contents… No. Not ready. I choose not to. Back to the format.

Because the film are played alphabetically from A to Z, one of the pleasures of the film’s gleefully playful premise is trying to guess the name of each segment – only revealed once the segment’s over – based on the horrors onscreen and knowing which letter it is. Some titles, once revealed, shed new light on some of the more abstract pieces – a kaleidoscopic visual beat poem of bubbles, flesh and burning gains new coherence when you discover it’s called O is for Orgasm – and some titles serve as a grim (or groan-worthy) punchline to the action.

Amongst the supergroup of directors (much like the Avengers, only with more matted hair and vomit screams) are Ben Wheatley (Kill List, Sightseers), Xavier Gens (Hitman), Ti West (The House of the Devil) and Nacho Vigalondo (Oscar-nominated short 7:35 in the Morning), and each and every director was given total creative freedom for their segment. Taste was no object, censorship was no object, and nothing was off limits. The producers wound up their artists and let them pinwheel, and that was the problem. If you tell a classroom of sugar-rushed kids to run off and bring back “anything”, some are going to bring you back a shiny pebble. Some are going to bring you a handful of what used to be a dog.

Ok then. The actual shorts themselves. Fine. I’ll try to keep them to a minimum but beyond this point, here be spoilers.

Let’s start with the Good ones, sadly all too few in number.

The film opened very strongly with Nacho Vigalondo’s A is for Apocalypse, a bittersweet tale about a woman’s plan to slowly poison her husband over a number of months being cut short by an impending cataclysm, forcing her to try and finish him quickly with whatever kitchen implements she has on hand. Gruesome, funny and surprisingly tender, Vigalondo set the bar immediately high.

Marcel Sarmiento’s D is for Dogfight was a mesmerising piece about a man and a dog battling in a man/beast fight club. Though it’s stressed in the credits that the piece not only met but exceeded the standards of animal care required by law, it’s an intensely uncomfortable but oddly beautiful piece, shot almost entirely in slow-motion, the skin and muscle of man and definitely-real dog alike rippling with each violent blow, screams and barks distorted into low jungle sirens.

X is for XXL is possibly the hardest watch of them all, a savage, intensely-violent short depicting a bullied overweight woman taking matters, and her extraneous flesh, into her own hands. I can’t honestly say I enjoyed watching this one but this was that rare case of the short’s theme actually being served by the graphic nature of the violence, rather that gore for gore’s sake.

Ben Wheatley’s U for Unearthed was a brief but effective little chiller, shot from the POV of an escaping vampire. Michael Smiley makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo as a priest and some nicely observed dialogue adds substance to a short that could’ve been over before it began.

Q for Quack was my personal favourite, a perfectly judged comedic piece of meta-storytelling charting the frustrations of the filmmakers, playing themselves, in their quest to make their short having been saddled with the letter Q.

Now for the Bad ones. There’ll be no joy in this for me.

Some of them left me entirely cold, being either so brief (C, E, M) or so self-consciously cryptic (O, R) that their impact is minimal. For the rest, there were animations, both drawn (K) and claymation (T), those comedic in tone, those that are deadly serious, those that mimiced the work of Robert Rodriguez so hard it came off as sycophancy, but it was the unpleasantness of it all that ultimately killed the project.

Now don’t get me wrong. I know it’s a horror film and as such it shouldn’t exactly be a whimsy picnic, but the problem with this being an anthology show is that, because they’ve only got between 5 and 10 minutes to be done, and because they have total control, the directors throw nothing but nastiness at us from A-Z. Some take the time to pace their work to let moments of calm or nuance shine through but so much of the 2 hour running time is unrelenting revulsion, especially in the second half, that it feels like nothing more than assault.

And then there are the Crazy ones… Jesus. Unicycling. Christ.

The majority of the films are, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, “all the way batshit.” In no particular order, here’s a taster selection of stuff that happens in these damn mindgriefs: a woman gets farted to death and sucked into a gas kingdom located within the arse of her beloved teacher where they break colourful wind together happily every after (on a totally unrelated note, this is one of the Japanese pieces), a woman gets murdered by her own turd, a topless Nazi fox stripper tries to assassinate a war hero dog (this is NOT one of the animations), a woman fires vegetables out of her vagina at an entirely different topless Nazi who’s wearing a giant strap-on with a sword sticking out of the end (also Japanese. Just saying), men are forced to compete over who can masturbate to climax quickest whilst old men rape young boys and a one legged girl pleasures herself with her own prosthesis (help me I think my mind is going), a dead baby’s head makes a sci-fi oppressor’s mind explode, a pederast is stabbed in the eye with a decapitated deer head, naked men dressed as bombs launch themselves into the – I’m done. I don’t want to … I’m done.

Total artistic freedom was a laudable thing for the directors to have been given, and probably a big reason that the producers secured the talent they did, but without overarching editorial control the film becomes just a relentless dirge of weird and revolting. It wore down my human tolerance and left me desperate for sunlight. Perhaps the film would be better enjoyed in a cinema or with the right blood-hungry crowd, and if you’re game I offer you a slight recommendation based on the sheer madness of it all, but watching it alone pushed me beyond disgust, through tedium and into exhaustion. Send help.

Hair-net is looking good Halle. 

Back in the day, and we’re defining ‘the day’ as the pre-TV, Pre Nazi roaring 20’s, montage films were all the rage. Before the techs figured out how to synchronize sound to picture, it was very difficult to tell a conventional a satisfying point A to point B narrative without burying the audience in text cards, or keeping things SUPER simple. The Montage film allowed cinema to deal in complexity, in loftier subjects and ideas, filtered through a whirling series of images communicating in pure emotion what pre-historic technology did not allow to words to express. Naturally, once they figured out which button to press and when and sound came into the picture, montage films were redundant and have remained mostly as the module film students least look forward to ever since.

Cloud Atlas is essentially a montage movie. Its unveils several stories out simultaneously, stories set in different time-zones, different places, told in different tones and different genres, all the usual things that connect ensemble dramas such as this. No, what connects the various narratives in Cloud Atlas is the philosophical supposition of re-incarnation, given tangeability by having the same actors play multiple roles to visualize the concept. That is to say, you know which re-incarnated character carries the soul of Tom Hanks because he will also be played by Tom Hanks. Confusion sidestepped.

You have the tales of a slave trader (Jim Sturgess) befriending a stowaway slave (David Gyasi) on board a 17th century vessel; a young, penniless composer (Ben Whishaw) playing piano man to a decrepit and aged composer (Jim Broadbent) in the 1930’s, a journalist (Halle Berry) trying to get to the bottom of a corporate conspiracy in the 70’s, A ne’er-do-well Publisher’s (Jim Boradbent) plight after being placed in an old folks home under false pretenses in the modern day, an artificially created waitress flesh-robot (Doona Bae) learning how to be a real girl in the not to distant future and in the far depths of the post apocalypse, the story of a simple villager (Tom Hanks) falling in love with a visitor (Halle Berry) from a technologically advanced far away land, whilst trying not to get eaten by tribal cannibals (Including Hugh Grant). I think that’s everything, but if I’ve missed anything it would be an entirely forgivable mistake given how much is going on in this movie.

Now before you ask, I haven’t read the novel, so there’s undoubtedly some more complex meaning and art that I’m missing in the adaptation, but I’ve long been a believer that an adaptation needs to stand on its own, and if it requires knowledge of the source material to fill in the gaps and make it a more satisfying experience then the bad is with the movie, not with me. But I liked Cloud Atlas. I didn’t love it, and I think it has a lot of problems, many of the severe variety, but for me it’s a movie that becomes more than the sum of its parts through sheer rip-roaring ambition and commitment. This is an attempt to make the greatest film ever made, and while it falls way short of that goal, it contains enough flashes of brilliance, ingenuity and boldness that ultimately make it a stark and original experience, worth watching for the moments if not the bigger picture.

I do however think that no story-line in and of itself is a 100%, the closest probably being the Ben Whishaw lead Composer segment, the simplest and most emotionally resonant, perhaps because its purer character story, whilst too many others get caught up in their own plot machinations, wasting precious time and lessening impact. I thought the Doona Bae lead story of the artificially created waitress was very good in its beginning but tailed off into something more generic at its end, but Bae is terrific in it. The conspiracy thriller and the Old person’s home farce were fairly abysmal, whilst the 17th century and post-apocalyptic segments leaned towards the bland, though both had their moments. Everything felt a little too rushed, as if they were trying to cram everything in to an already epic 172 minute running time, and lost a lot of nuance along the way.

Perhaps the main joy of the movie is seeing it’s various actors forced to work their acting muscles unforgivingly in multiple roles. For some reason I love movies where actors play more than one part, so that makes me a bit of sucker for this, but I think it gives you a fantastic, condensed example of what actors are really capable of. Hugh Grant is largely wasted, playing a series of peripheral parts in the various story-lines without getting one to really take centre stage or even play second fiddle, though the image of him as a murderous cannibal is certainly striking. Ben Whishaw inhabits the most developed character and also is the soul of the movie, Halle Berry and Jim Sturgess do jobs, whilst Doona Bae excels in a her featured role but is weaker in others. The two stellar performances, the first, somewhat predictably, comes from Hugo Weaving, who only has minor roles but is in full on boss mode and  in almost all of them, but particularly in the post-apocalyptic episode, where he plays a malicious voice in Tom Hanks head, and looks like an overgrown, decayed Jiminy Cricket. Glorious.

The second comes from Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks is just one of the best actors on the planet. He’s an easy guy to forget because of his enormous success as an every-man, but the man has never given a bad performance in a movie, and almost invariably the strongest aspect of everything he’s in. And maybe with the exception of a Weaving performance here and there, the five best turns in this film are all Hanks, whether in over the top supporting turns or in his more traditional performance as the every-man survivor Zachry, Hanks really shows the depth and range he has to offer here, and it was gratifying to see him stretch himself like this.

Ultimately though, I can’t help but feel that if Cloud Atlas has cut out a couple of its weaker segments it would have been the better for it, narratives fight each other for screen-time and inevitably the threads of some get lost in lieu of making space. But there are enough great scenes and performances that I feel fine in recommending this bloated, ambitious mess. It’s punching for the same kind of visual poetry of an Eisenstein or Bunuel, but to bring it into cinema at its most modern, yet its handicapped by exposition and cliche and occasionally a lack of inspiration. Still, you want see anything else like this at the cinema this year, I guarantee you of that.

Rating: 7/10