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Review Written by Jonathan Weichsel
There are some films that you like because they are so good, some films that you like because they are so bad, and some films that you like because they are completely insane. Virginia Obscura falls into the latter category. The insanity in Virginia Obscura isn’t the over the top Grindhouse kind that we have grown used to, but rather a more subtle kind of madness.
Virginia Obscura is about a woman who kidnaps four men who gang banged her mother years ago at a party. Any one of these men could be her dad. She is mad at them not only because one is a deadbeat, but because all four took advantage of her mother sexually. As she tortures them however, she learns that although they are all awful people, the truth is not as black and white as she first imagined.
The film has a slow, hypnotic tone created through unusual editing choices, weird, lingering shots, and a repetitive score that doesn’t let up. The rhythmic feel of the editing is accentuated by the primary location, a room covered in plain brown rapping paper. Beyond the unusual look of the film, every single choice the director makes is just bizarre. For example, the four captive men wear identical burlap sacks over their heads throughout the film, and their captor wears a mask. This is unsettling, because although the film is told almost completely through dialogue, you rarely see any of the speaker’s faces. No sane director would make a choice like this, but it really works.
Virginia Obscura feels like a film that was directed by a madman, and I really like it for that. This kind of offbeat, idiosyncratic vision is the reason indie filmmaking exists. The emotions in the film are raw, and although they may seem juvenile and underdeveloped, it is this lack of development that makes them so intense.
There are two very, very brief cameos by scream queens Linnea Quigly and Jessica Cameron. Actually, you just see still photographs of the two actresses with some voiceover that doesn’t last more than a few minutes.
Virginia Obscura is a very, very strange film, but it also feels completely authentic, in that I never got the feeling that the people involved had any idea how weird this film is. In fact, with all of its strange flourishes, the Virginia Obscura is as unpretentious as you can get.
