A Walk Among the Tombstones: All cut up over women

A Walk Among the Tombstones
Starring: Liam Neeson, Dan Stevens, Boyd Holbrook, Sebastian Roché
Rated: 6/10
It’s a been-there, done-that story but stands apart because of the unabashed way it portrays unbridled violence again women. Yes, a melancholic, always in regret Liam Neeson as private detective on the trail of unscrupulous and inhuman serial women killers gives the film weightage with his controlled acting, but the unmitigated torture of victims shocks without any plugs.
Women here are being surveyed, assessed and picked up by two gay serial killers and thrown out literally in bits and pieces. The close-up of the terror that these hapless women go through runs a chill down your spine and makes you cringe in horror. Director Scott Frank has plunged into unspeakable torture visuals which get only enhanced, thanks to his cleverly deliberate props of acoustics and shrouded processes of killing.
The tone of this crime thriller gets set with the visuals of a cemetery caretaker trying to fish out plastic gunny bags from a lake and, for a split second, you see a severed head of a blonde woman in one of the pouches. Then there are several other scenes which show how unscrupulous and inhuman the killers are though it is not explained why they are doing this.
Amid all this violence, there is Neeson who reluctantly takes up the case of a drug dealer whose wife has been killed, chopped finely, stuffed into drug pouches and sent off to the husband in a car dickey. So intent is the director in making you shudder that when the husband picks up one packet, fresh blood of his chopped up wife oozes out of it! As if that’s not enough, there’s a tape which records every scream and plea of the woman as she is being cut up.
Neeson, as usual, renders a solid performance, showing how well he can manage roles in which a grim and sad side of his persona manages to tower over personal crisis and render the criminals where they belong. The cat and mouse chase, the old fashioned tactics of the detective and all the blood and gore around the proceedings keeps you on the edge though, by the end of it all, you wonder if you really needed to be put through such relentless atrocities against women.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 21 September, 2014

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