But it got me to thinking about what pretense IS, in this context. Like, I can be all smart and shit and say “this isn’t really pretentious, it just went over their head and that angers and confuses them” but that’s a pretty dickish take too, and maybe if I’m going to be a dick about terms, I should make an attempt to define them. What I settled on, for myself at least, is that in this specific context, a pretentious film is one that is didactic and presumes that the audience is ignorant of what is really an easily observed idea, treating it as a huge revelation.
And that got me to thinking about “game” movies. It’s a particular type of scary movie where a single person or group of people have been selected to play some kind of game, one with escalating stakes that promises a considerable prize in exchange for what ends up being considerable moral compromise. Invariably, the point of the film (usually articulated by the antagonist) is that people will do things they don’t think they’re capable of if the stakes are high enough, which, no shit. There are countless examples of this, both in the behavioral sciences and in real-life situations. This is not news to any but the most absolutely sheltered. The Saw films are prototypical examples of the game film, but certainly not the only ones. Kill Theory, 13 Tzameti, Would You Rather, The Task and My Little Eye come to mind as well. Some of these are better than others, but in general I’m not much of a fan of game films. They tend to insult the intelligence of their audience.
I’m not a fan of game films, and 13 Sins is not helping that one single bit.
The film opens in Australia, as a distinguished academic is taking the podium at an event presumably celebrating his retirement. He looks wary, distressed. It’s the look you see on someone who may be in the later stages of dementia, and he opens with a slightly off-color joke. That gets some laughs, but he follows it with an outright filthy limerick that gets no laughs at all. Up to this point then, we could be watching the public disintegration of a once-great mind, and the woman who introduced him comes up to usher him away from the podium, but then - tearfully, apologizing the whole while - he cuts her finger off. The room erupts into mayhem and the man is shot by police.
Cut to our actual protagonist, Elliott Brindle, as his fiancée prepares him for a meeting with his boss. There’s a lot riding on this: Their wedding is coming up, she’s pregnant, he’s solely responsible for the care of his developmentally disabled brother. He’s praying for a promotion, because money is tight.
Naturally, he is instead fired.
Not only is he fired, but he also finds out in short order that his father - his awful, abusive, racist father - can no longer afford his place in assisted living, and will have to move in with Elliott, Elliott’s utterly dependent brother, and Elliott’s fiancée, who did I mention is Black? Because she is. All of this occurs in the first ten minutes or so of the film, quick cuts from one awful thing to another. Elliott, desperate, finds himself on an empty road at night, at a red light. There’s a fly buzzing around inside the car. He has no idea how he’s going to handle any of this, and then he gets a phone call. A genial voice on the other end of the line tells Elliott that he’s been selected to be a contestant in a very exclusive game, once which could make him a millionaire. This genial voice knows a lot - frankly, an upsetting amount - about Elliott and his current woes, and tells him that all Elliott needs to do is complete 13 tasks, each rewarding an increasingly larger amount of money. To begin, all Elliott needs to do is kill the fly that is currently buzzing around inside his car. He does, and immediately gets an alert from his bank that money has been deposited to his account.
Then the voice tells him to eat the fly.
The problems begin with Elliott, and his situation. It’s been said that comedy is the worst day ever of someone else’s life, and this film seems to take that to heart. Our introduction to Elliott is basically “boy, I sure hope nothing goes wrong today!” followed by everything going wrong. There’s no tension because he’s entirely framed in terms of how precarious his situation is. It’s not just his job, it’s his upcoming wedding, it’s his child, it’s his dependent brother, it’s his dependent father, all of this is piled in one after the other with an immediacy that feels less tense than just absurd. His boss is a caricature villain, like a refugee from a dinner theater production of In The Company Of Men, and his father is nothing but verbose invective and contempt. It’s two-dimensional, like an EC Comics story come to life, but not in a good way.
And that’s where the comedy of the worst day of someone else’s life comes in - it’s so absurd that as the film moves on, the tone ends up being a queasy mix of comic goofiness and cruelty. At one point Elliott is ordered to steal a one-of-a-kind nativity scene (made by blind children, no less - everything is pitched at a level of ridiculous) and destroy it, and the whole thing is played as slapstick, rather than the act of a desperate man at war with his own conscience. Elliott himself is drawn as a pathetic milquetoast, and his situation is so cartoonishly dire that it feels less like we’re watching a basically decent person struggle with a moral quandary than it does a bug having its wings pulled off by an especially malicious child.
There’s no real dilemma or tension because there’s no real choice - his desperation is pitched so high so soon that there’s no question he’s going to keep taking the deal, he’s so meek and wishy-washy that we’re invited to laugh at him, rather than sympathize with him, and the challenges he’s put through become so sadistic so quickly that the only tension is seeing what awful direction he’s going to get yanked in next. It’s like something out of a Farrelly Brothers movie right up to the point that people start losing limbs and dying, at which point we’re kind of in Saw territory. The two don’t mix.
This is all undergirded by a weird, muddled take on transformation. We’re never really shown who’s running Elliott through all of this (which is probably smart), and their motives are never really articulated. There are some feints toward the supernatural (that are never really pursued), but also toward the idea this is some game for the wealthy and powerful, who are watching him be put through his paces, via the spies and cameras they have everywhere, but then at other times it’s described as an exercise in moving Elliott away from his old self.
As the film moves on, Elliott starts acting more liberated, or confident (or evil) the more challenges he completes, which is a weird message to send. The film begins with him being a basically goodhearted guy who is mocked for his decency, with a lot of dialogue about how much of a pathetic doormat he is and always has been. So there are a couple of things this film could be communicating: One is that the atrocities he’s committing are in fact a vehicle for self-actualization, which reads like the filmmakers didn’t know Fight Club was a black comedy, or - and this is reinforced by messages he receives that he’s still “too close to [his] old self,” - we’re being hit over the head with the idea that given enough desperation, anyone can do monstrous things. Which, as I pointed out at the beginning, is not an especially novel or insightful point. So either “we are all capable of being bad,” which no shit, or “being bad should be celebrated,’ which fuck you.
Thematically, this film is a mess, but narratively, it’s a disaster. The writing is obvious, ham-handed, and sounds nothing like how people actually talk. There are odd details stuck in throughout that are never explained or resolved (an ostrich makes an appearance for no apparent reason, a bus driven by a mysterious masked stranger is never commented upon) and it’s hard to tell how much of that is by design and how much of it is shoddy storytelling. Is it supposed to make the whole thing seem quirky? Why would you try to strike that tone in a film about a desperate man debasing himself? Was it supposed to be explained elsewhere and got edited out? Maybe, there are all kinds of logical holes in this film - we’re expected to believe that after a number of law enforcement officials witness him commit acts of vandalism and serious injury, nobody would continue pursuing him simply because no paperwork was ever filed. Elliott irrevocably ruins his rehearsal dinner and his fiancée’s reaction is “mildly puzzled.” Elliott’s brother is developmentally disabled and requires medication, except he doesn’t always take it to no apparent effect, and even though he can’t live on his own, nobody’s supervising him and his level of functioning varies as the plot dictates. In general, people are who they need to be to move the plot along, not fleshed-out human beings.
Finally, the ending is kind of anticlimactic and… not necessarily obvious, but the “twists” don’t make a lot of sense, so there’s little shock. The people you think are going to be bad guys early on turn out to be bad guys, it seems to take place in a world where all kinds of people play this game run by a shadowy, omnipotent group without anyone ever finding out, and as is true for the rest of the film, people don’t act like people, they act like they need to for the film to end. And after what seems to be about 36 hours of depravity, destruction, and multiple murder, the most Elliott can seem to muster is sort of “whew, what a day.” There do not appear to be any consequences or any real stain on his soul. It’s muddled, and doesn’t open up into anything larger or carry any real sort of weight.
And that’s probably the biggest failing this film has. “Game” movies often purport to serve as moral lessons, but there’s nothing here that really resonates or to which the audience can connect. It’s almost singular in how it undermines dramatic tension by making the situation ridiculous, the decent protagonist an object of derision, and the entire exercise pointless and consequence-free in the end. There’s no drama, there’s no game, just an entirely unnecessary film.
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Available on Netflix
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