Movies
Sundance ’10 REVIEW: ‘7 Days’ a Powerful Film, 2 Positive Reviews!
Straight from the 2010 Sundance Film Festival comes not one, but TWO positive looks at Podz’s 7 Days. “Powerful performances and a challenging message make Daniel Grou’s (also known as “Podz”) 7 Days one of this year’s first surprise films to come from way out of left field. Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, this French-Canadian thriller tells a deeply immersive story that at no point strays from its intended path and delivers with such a punch that you’ll be talking about it for 7 days after.” Click the title above for Mr. Disgusting’s full review or read on to see what Ryan Daley had to say. Watch this spot for tons of from Ryan ion the coming week.
I hate to admit it, but of the 8 films I plan on seeing at the Sundance Film Festival this week, 7 Days has been the one movie I’ve had a hard time getting excited about. When I read the synopsis about a mourning father who tortures his daughter’s murderer over 7 agonizing days, I immediately imagined a grainy, screeching, mean-spirited foreign rip-off of every American torture porn movie to be released since Saw. Seems like foreign torture-porn rip-offs are legion these days. But before leaving for the movie theater, I happened to notice Mr. Disgusting’s 4-star rating, and my curiosity was piqued. I still haven’t read his review, which I’ve purposely avoided to prevent my own opinion from being tainted, but I look forward to reading it immediately after wrapping this up.
Once I arrived at the theater, I overheard Sundance volunteers whispering reverent rumors of theater walk-outs, so I prepared myself to be disturbed, at the same time knowing that Sundance audiences are usually jam-packed with pansies. But to my pleasant surprise, 7 Days turned out to be a mature, thoughtful film about the traumatic emotional pain that comes with the death of a child…that just happens to have some pretty fucked-up torture scenes.
When Dr. Bruno Hamel’s 8-year-old daughter goes missing one school day, he enlists the local police to help him search the neighborhood. It doesn’t take long before they find his daughter’s body in the nearby woods, bound, raped and murdered. The doctor and his wife are devastated, but the police soon state that they’ve located the killer. They’ve DNA-matched the semen of a known pervert. It’s an open-and-shut case.
Wracked with the loss of his only child, Dr. Hamel sets up a torture chamber in an abandoned cabin, and enlists a couple of thugs to help him get the murderer out of police custody. Over the next week, Hamel methodically tortures his daughter’s killer, even as the local police slowly close in on Hamel’s backwoods hiding place.
7 Days straddles the line between art film and horror film–I found myself haunted by the recurring image of a deer carcass that Dr. Hamel discovers in the woods outside his torture cabin. Uncomfortable with the sight, Hamel covers the deer with logs, only to find it uncovered by predators the next day. So he takes it out in a rowboat and drops it in the lake. Only to have it float and drift back to the shoreline. Like the raw hollowness he feels inside, the deer carcass refuses to be buried or sunk. It’s a memorable metaphor.
Stillness abounds in 7 Days. With limited dialogue and no background music, the ambient sounds dominate, making the character interactions more realistic. Employing slow, lulling tracking shots to tell his story, director Daniel Grou has crafted a graphic, sometimes sadistic horror film that still manages to come across as restrained. In the world of 7 Days, it’s the torturer, rather than the tortured, who is living true horror.
Rating: 4/5 Skulls
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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