Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
After completing jail time for beating up a man who tried to seduce his mentally-handicapped teenage daughter, the Butcher wants to start life anew. He institutionalizes his daughter and moves to the Lille suburbs with his mistress, who promises him a new butcher shop. Learning that she lied, the Butcher returns to Paris to find his daughter.
Gaspar Noé's debut feature is a viscerally distinctive work of New French Extremism — a relentless monologue of misanthropy and nihilism delivered through aggressive voiceover, jarring intertitles, and a confrontational formal style that is unmistakably Noé's own. Philippe Nahon's performance as the unnamed Butcher is rawly authentic, a deeply unsettling portrait of simmering rage and social alienation. The cinematography is punishingly claustrophobic and deliberately ugly in a purposeful way. The film earns exceptional Novelty not for reinventing cinema but for its singular, uncompromising voice and execution — few films are this committed to inhabiting a repugnant consciousness. The plot is thin by design, a pressure-cooker character study rather than a narrative engine, which keeps it from a top mark. The ending, while provocative with its 30-second warning to sensitive viewers, feels somewhat deflating after the sustained tension — the near-violent climax pulls back in a way that is thematically interesting but slightly unsatisfying as a formal resolution.