Frustrated filmmaker turns serial killer in I Blame Society
The new Gillian Wallace Horvat black comedy ‘I Blame Society’ is a complicated mix of cinema verité (a French expression that translates to ‘truthful cinema’) and comedic exasperation.
The audience is taken on a bewildering ride when struggling, low budget filmmaker Gillian (played by Gillian Wallace Horvat, who also directs the film), takes murderous revenge on some of the people who have rejected her scripts in movie-obsessed Los Angeles.
Highlighting the correlation between making movies and becoming a successful serial killer, Gillian uses the idea of ‘hypothetically’ eliminating those people she dislikes, using her social and work circles to start off with.
Eventually, in an even more macabre twist, she progresses to murdering virtually any suitable people she can find, while filming it all along the way.
The movie opens with Gillian’s script about political machinations in Israel being rejected – just another in a long line of knockbacks she has suffered in previous years.
Unspeakably angry, Gillian goes to her boyfriend Keith (Keith Poulson) with her new movie idea to make a low budget movie – starring her as a real-life serial killer – and in which she actually films herself committing these ‘murders’ on ‘real life’ film sets.
Her first ‘victim’ is an old schoolfriend who is about to marry a woman Gillian believes to be ‘evil and manipulating’.
Setting off on a short hike in the hills around LA with the friend on the pretence of ‘reconnecting’ after several years estrangement, Gillian ‘accidentally’ provides him with a bagel that has had sesame seeds on it, knowing he is highly allergic.
When queried as to whether the bagel has any seeds, Gillian insists she has removed all trace of them but, shortly after, her friend succumbs to a severe anaphylactic attack, thus, becoming the first of Gillian’s victims.
Further killings are captured on film by Gillian, including people she dislikes at work, as well as random victims played by ‘non-actors’ off the street.
The whole premise for the movie revolves around Gillian ‘redirecting’ her movie-making skills into becoming the best serial killer she can be.
In one case towards the end of the film, this involves her breaking and entering the home of one of her enemies and rearranging the room into a crime scene, while at the same time filming everything and murdering the occupant.
Such detail not only makes the film more interesting but keeps the audience involved, as Gillian’s continuous use of a variety of cheap digital cameras (including, unusually, a ‘head-held’ one), captures all of the action.
An extremely quirky and sometimes disturbing film, I Blame Society is showing at Luna Cinemas Leederville from May 20, 2021.
