Grade: B-/C+
Horror comedy
Not rated (would be PG-13)
Final Cut is an onion of sorts, a 2022 French film with English subtitles that will vary in its appeal based on how much viewers know about (and appreciate) low-budget filmmaking, how much they like the tongue-in-cheek zombie subgenre of horror, and how many of the film’s subtle gags they happen to catch or find funny.
It’s entertaining in a heady sort of way—more clever than silly, and more silly than laugh-out-loud funny. For me, the gold standard for horror comedy remains the quirky Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, a hilarious parody of slasher films and all their familiar tropes. That one is both clever and laugh-out-loud funny. Final Cut is perhaps even cleverer, but funny in a way that makes you smile.
Final Cut, which opened for general release the same day it screened at the Cannes Film Festival, is part of a burgeoning subgenre of films in which the audience watches both a movie plot that unfolds as well as the behind-the-scenes action—a postmodern self-consciousness that directs the viewers’ attention to the process of filmmaking or theater production and the relationship between process and product. Think Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation or Synecdoche, New York, or Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).
Like I said, heady stuff that will nonetheless appeal to fans of the subgenre because it parts the curtain on low-budget guerilla filmmaking, and that can be more fascinating than the movie that they’re filming.
Directed by Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), Final Cut is a remake/adaptation of a 2017 Japanese horror-comedy One Cut of the Dead, but you don’t have to have seen that film to appreciate this one. It just adds another layer to peel away and savor.
Hazanavicius said he wouldn’t have been surprised if some people at the Cannes screening “whistle or boo after 20 minutes.” That’s because what we think we see for the first 20 minutes or so seems like a generically bad low-budget B-movie that’s chaotic, poorly cast, and shot on the cheap. I say “poorly cast” because the characters have Japanese names though they’re clearly European and speaking French.
There’s an explanation for that and everything else we see in those first 20 minutes, but I won’t spoil it by saying anything more. As I said, it’s a clever onion of a film that can be appreciated as an onion, but much more so if more of the layers can be perceived. I’ll give you one right now: Yoshiro Takehara, who plays a producer that’s funding the film and has her own ideas about what her money should buy, had the same role in the 2017 original that this film partly spoofs and partly remakes.
In Final Cut, Romain Duris plays a passionate and slightly crazy director who normally directs infomercials and small documentaries and seems out-of-his-league making a film about cast and crew members that, one-by-one, turn into zombies. The character mix seems familiar enough: two daughters who have their own opinions about how the film should be shot, an egocentric prima donna of an actor, a crew member who drinks too much . . . on the job, and a bevy of producers to keep happy. As far as the audience goes, Final Cut will keep viewers happy as long as they appreciate the cleverness, but patience is definitely a virtue, for there are many lackluster stretches where you have to give Hazanavicius the benefit of the doubt and wait to see where he’s going with it all.
This gleefully gory, meta film with scatological humor might be played tongue-in-cheek, but even at that it’s only suitable for older teens and adults. In the end, I thought it was above-average, but couldn’t touch Tucker and Dale—even with its satisfying ending. Tucker and Dale grabs you from the very beginning, while Final Cut seems to start slow and gradually build momentum and interest. But as with Tucker and Dale you’ll find yourself thinking about the film later and realizing how clever it actually was. And young filmmaker wannabes will get the same sort of inspiration as they may have gotten from The Fabelmans.
In case you’re wondering, Final Cut didn’t make the cut for awards at Cannes, but it did win Best Motion Picture Score at the Fantasia Film Festival and Hazanavicius earned a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for a César, the French equivalent of the Oscars.
Entire family: No (Age 10 and older)
Run time: 111 min., Color
Studio/Distributor: Kino Lorber
Aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Featured audio: French 5.1 DTS with English subtitles
Bonus features: C
Not rated (would be PG-13 for bloody violence and gore and brief nudity and scatological humor)
Language: 7/10—F-bombs and other language galore, but the act of reading subtitles while processing visual information somehow makes it seem less impactful
Sex: 3/10—One scene that’s fairly tame and nothing else major that I can remember; rather, anything sexual is mostly talk and allusions
Violence: 7/10—The violence here is intended to be gory and shocking in a campy sort of way; a head gets lopped off, another character takes an axe to the head, an arm gets ripped off, there’s projectile vomiting, but again, all in a campy sort of way
Adult situations: 5/10—One main character is an alcoholic, and there’s drinking and some smoking I think (hard to say because your focus is elsewhere)
Takeaway: I can see why the director thought audiences might boo around the 20-minute mark, but that’s because of structural decisions the director made; filming it in another sequence or way ultimately wouldn’t have been as effective
Family Home Theater 