User reviews

I saw "Livid" at the FrightFest in London a few days ago and had neither particularly high nor low expectations before the film started. When the credits began to roll 88 minutes later the final result was similar to my opinion of Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's directorial debut in 2007 with "Inside" – it was good but flawed. However, any comparisons of the two films end here as they are on the opposing sides of the same genre and very different in their own right.

The plot evolves around a young woman named Lucy who is beginning her training as an in-house caregiver. During her visit to an unattended old woman who is in a cerebral coma and living in an isolated, looming mansion, she discovers that years earlier she had allegedly placed a large treasure within one of its many locked rooms. As Lucy returns home the viewer learns of her struggles which are both financial and emotional due to a recent loss. Soon after she is persuaded to return to the house by her boyfriend and his brother in search for the supposed treasure and, in doing so, this is where their lives begin to go rapidly downhill…

Firstly, I'll start with the good elements of "Livid." The cinematography and visuals are absolutely beautiful and really make it a pleasurable viewing experience, especially when combined with the pulsing, brooding score of the film. The actress who plays Lucy is fantastic in her starring role, playing a likable character but with genuine depth, and there are no complaints to be made about the supporting cast. Furthermore, and probably the most importantly – the film is absolutely terrifying at times. This was primarily psychological but also aided by some fantastic imagery.

Regarding the weaker parts of the movie, I felt that the first two thirds of the film are substantially better than the final third. This is because, to put it simply, the film does not seem to know which genre it wants to be. The transaction it makes when switching is not a particularly smooth one. Because of this, many gaping plot holes are left open and at times it is a struggle to make sense of what exactly is going on. Another issue with "Livid" was that the filmmakers seemed too dependent on "jump" scares which cheapened the movie and often ruined both the tension and flow. Finally, I think the very ending was much sillier than intended.

So whilst I had my issues with "Livid" I still believe that the strength of the positives more than compensates for the negative aspects, and that overall this is a genuinely good movie. I would recommend this to any horror (or even fantasy) fan. Considering the graphic nature of their previous film, it was interesting seeing the filmmakers experiment with such a different approach to the genre. And all in all, I believe it was successful.

7/10

Livide is a French horror film i the style of The Orphanage, in that it has just as much heart and fantasy as it does horror. A young woman begins working as a nurse and sees a number of elderly and sick patients. One in particular catches her eye, an old woman in a coma, who it is said, has a treasure hidden on the grounds. The young nurse and her boyfriend, along with a friend, decide to find the treasure. They break into the house but get more than they bargained for. The film builds up a meticulous but thoughtful pace, bringing us slowly into the world of this house at night. The fiilm keeps the horror at a distance at first, with loud noises from upstairs etc. Once it kicks off the gore is grotesque, but used sparingly, making it even more effective. Some of the visuals are of pure fantasy and even though they are at first horrifying, Maury and Bustillo soon use them poetically. A floating vampire girl in the sunlight, a wind-up corpse etc. All scary at first, become even more disturbing as they reach us on an emotional level. I felt the film tries to do too much in the third act. It tries to give us horror and fantasy, backstory in flashbacks, kills, and exposition, to the point it got a bit muddled. Kills were suddenly followed by long jumps into the past. The film does best when it shows its story visually, which thankfully, it chooses to do most of the time. Great performances, stunning visuals, a unique feel, and a mature handling of difficult themes makes this a worthwhile horror.

(source: www.top10horror.com ) I watched this movie during the Film 4 FrightFest Halloween marathon last year in London and next to Human Centipede II it was the most anticipated movie of the night. Being a French horror enthusiast I couldn't wait until the movie would be screened and after an awful show of Lulu Jarmen's "Bad Meat" (2011) it finally started.

Lucy, an absolutely adorable young girl, with two eyes of different colours is the main character of Livid. She is just starting her training as a caretaker under Wilson's eye, a woman you want to trust but she just seems old and bitter. Lucy is brought to a big mansion where she meets Mrs Jessel, an old lady who has been in a coma for many years. Wilson tells her a story about a treasure that is believed to be somewhere inside of the house and that, Wilson herself, has tried to find it but she never did.

After the first day of work Lucy meets her friends and tells them about the treasure rumour. The group of young people decide to break in Mrs Jessel's house with an intention to find the valuable objects to steal. They don't know what awaits them in the walls of the house though…

Seeing Alexandre Bustillo's and Julien Maury's "Inside" (A l'interieur) (Top 10 French Horror list) I knew to expect only the unpredictable. I was expecting a twist and a lot… tons of blood and French cinema didn't let me down at all.

At the very second I saw Lucy's eyes (you could totally see which eye is fake by the way) I remembered some stories I've heard about people with two-coloured eyes. Later Lucy explains that this is indeed called heterochromia and people are believed to have two souls, one for each eye. We learn a lot about Lucy's past through flashbacks (anyone recognizes the psycho woman from "Inside" as Lucy's mummy?) which makes us feel for the character. Everything framed with the beautiful music makes you feel nice and cosy watching the movie until… horrible stuff happens.

Overall a stunningly done horror film, that doesn't lack in everything a horror movie should have, ended up in my French favourite top 10 list and I would watch it again anytime I if had a chance. I definitely recommend this movie no matter what you are into. If you like mysteries, gore, paranormal movies, just go for it and enjoy the ride.

Chloé Coulloud plays trainee care worker Lucie Klavel, whose first day on the job sees her visit the crumbling country home of elderly coma patient Mrs. Jessel. On learning from her boss that Jessel, a once successful ballet teacher, is rumoured to have a vast fortune hidden somewhere in her house, Lucie, her boyfriend, and his brother break into the old building to search for the treasure, but uncover a terrifying secret instead.

I absolutely loved French directing duo Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's brilliantly inventive and very bloody debut Inside, which only makes it all the more disappointing that their second film, Livid, is such a complete and utter mess, a hodge-podge of half-baked ideas wrapped in a stale 'freaky fairytale' aesthetic that makes not a lick of sense.

A gang of thieves breaking into a building only to discover something terrible lurking inside is hardly the most original of ideas, and Livid's surreal, oneiric style, which includes the use of such trite horror clichés as bizarre toys, broken dolls, creepy children, and stuffed animals, only adds to the sense of deja vu. The ironic thing is, when the directors do steer their film into more original waters, matters only get worse, the pair delivering plenty of surreal spookiness and some decent gore but failing to give a rational explanation for any of the madness they depict.

Vampiric creatures; a 'broken' ballerina given a clockwork spine; soul transference via moth; ethereal will-o-the-wisp flames; a flying house: undeniably very bizarre, but what the hell it's all about is anyone's guess. Bustillo and Maury sure aren't telling...

3.5 out of 10, rounded up to 4 for IMDb.

From the directors of À l'intérieur (2007) this is their follow-up. Inside as it was called outside France was know as one of the holy gory french flicks so everybody was expecting the next Inside but it isn't.

One way I was glad that they didn't made a copy of Inside but on the other hand I was sad that this isn't one of French gore flicks. Still it's an excellent movie. I agree, I had difficulties with the end but regardless that fact I rather enjoyed this creepy flick which still has it's gory moments.

Lucy (Chloé Coulloud)has her first day as in-house caregiver. Everything goes well until she is asked not to follow inside the house of Mrs Jessel (Marie-Claude Pietragalla)but curiosity killed the cat and she does enter the house only to see an old which look-a- like woman laying in bed. On her neck a chain with a key. Going back home Lucy met her lover and his boyfriend William (Félix Moati) and Ben (Jérémy Kapone). Both not having a lot of money and Lucy telling of the key and the treasure connecting to end they enter the house. From there on this normal flick turns into a slow building creepy flick until the extreme gore comes in. The acting was okay but again it's the effects used for the gore (no CGI) that makes it all worth watching.

Being a bit of a supernatural thing some will turn it off after a while but keep waiting until Mrs Jessel wakes up out of her coma. A rather good surprise and I would recommend it to gorehounds but be warned, it isn't like the holy French goreflicks.

Gore 2,5/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 4/5 Story 3/5 Comedy 0/5

"Livide" was a major disappointment for me, especially after I was thrilled to get to see it after what I read on the back of the DVD cover. This movie was nothing at all as what I had expected it to be.

The storyline, well I will not go into detail here and give anything away. But I will summarize it briefly; it is about a young girl who takes on the work as a caregiver and comes to learn of a supposed treasure in the house of an old, withering, dying woman. But the house holds a terrible secret.

Right, well first of all, you need to go about 45 minutes or so into the movie before anything even remotely worthwhile starts to happen. And even after that, then the movie is a bit too surreal and far-fetched to properly catch my liking.

What works out well for the movie is the imagery and the camera work. There is some really nice shots in the movie and the contrast of colors is just spectacular. So visually, then "Livide" is a great movie and I would rate the movie higher if this was a factor important enough to lift up the movie, but it wasn't.

The people hired to portray the various roles were doing good jobs with their given roles and characters, however they were just struggling with a rather ridiculous storyline.

Effects-wise, then "Livide" was actually quite upbeat. The special effects were nice to look at and worked out quite well. The make-up effects too. So thumbs up for this part.

The storyline goes from dull and slow-paced, so strange and somewhat surreal. I supposed this movie is a matter of acquired taste, however personally, I didn't really care much for it. For a horror movie, it was fairly tame.

A young home health aide finds out her new patient, a comatose old woman in a dark, gloomy mansion, was once a famous ballet instructor who's said to have a fortune hidden somewhere in the house. That night, the girl tells her beau about it and together with a friend they go back to rob the place -on Halloween, no less. Once they break in, the nightmare begins...

A less garish blend of Mario Bava's "A Drop Of Water" (BLACK SABBATH) and Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA with a stately, "sedated" sort of style that gives the rural landscape, crumbling estate, and supernatural happenings a weird kind of MASTERPIECE THEATER vibe. The budget wasn't bad and the FX were pretty good but overall a 7/10. It would have been nice if whoever did the subtitles actually knew English.

After watching this pretentious and utterly silly piece of crap, I can't help but wonder if Bustillo and Maury did really made the notable "Inside" or it was actually done by some friend of them.

If you dare to watch this thing, you'll find yourself trying to digest a boring collection of clichés put together by means of an almost inexistent plot and a total lack of interesting ideas. Yeah, a bloody ballerina make for a creepy image and so does the old lady with the breathing artifact inside the over the top old mansion, but this doesn't make a movie. For that you would need some decent script, good characters, and a good enough story at least. You'll find none of it in Livide.

There are many, many scary movies better that this one... Avoid until you've seen all of them. Lets hope that "Aux yeux des vivants" gets closer to "A l'interieur". This is far, far away.

Looking round a spooky old house inhabited by no-one but a comatose old lady for hidden treasure is usually not a good idea. Especially on Halloween. At the dead of night. This building is chock full of stuffed creatures, dusty relics and boarded up windows. But our three interlopers are desperate to get out of their dead-end lives, so in they go... and it turns out to be the worst mistake of their (soon to be cut short) young lives.

The best horror films always have a good atmosphere, and you can feel every creak of the floorboards and each goose-pimple developing as the intrepid trio do their rounds. There are no cheap, easy deaths here... each one is built up careful and slow, until the nasty denouement. And these are people who given *gasp* BACK STORIES and what they says sounds like it could come from the mouth of a person, rather than a simple lamb to the slaughter.

I'm not quite sure I understood all the plot details (even at the end) but what I can report is the execution is ingenious and genuinely disturbing. A horror with some semblance of originality, who'd have thunk it? Perhaps because it was made in France... away from the jaded genre prototypes of the USA. Coming soon: a remake, where they remove most of the chilling ambiance, and replace it with an unsubtle bloodbath, And a sassy robot. You know it's certain... 7/10

A Ballet-School-Teacher. A hundred-year old witch. Dead Girls. Mirrors. Scissors. An old dark house. A girl heroine. Insects.

Well. We are right here in Argento-Fairytale-Giallo Wonderland. And for anyone not old or literate enough to know Suspiria and Inferno, it must be a strange viewing experience. But here we are and the directors actually put it right in front of your nose: They show the certificates the witch/vampire got form the Freiburg Ballet Schule (yes and it is exactly the one out of Suspiria). Even more, you got the Scissors-in-the neck scene (Suspiria), Hidden Rooms (Inferno), Mirrors (Suspiria), Moths (ah.. Phenomena), a nonsensical Plot (of course Inferno) a complete reluctance to explain things (inferno) and a dream-like structure (Inferno). Basically this should have been the perfect conclusion to the Three-Mothers-Trilogy (Cozzi's and Argentos efforts don't count due to their lack of determination). But it only comes close as there are no memorable set-pieces and most of the film is handed in the Lamberto Bava (Graveyard Disturbance or Demoni (the film-in-film)) style of "Hey we're 3 youngsters, and there is a treasure in an old house, so let's go and get killed by that vampirelady".

So it's a mixed blessing. To Argento-followers this is a must. Everyone else should check it out. But sadly no masterpiece. And coming from the guys who did inside it actually is a disappointment.

You may know the filmmaker from the movie Inside. If you expect this to be the same OTT movie, then you better stay clear of it, because it isn't. This movie is more of a fairy tale (if you want to call it that, because it still is horror). While it's often obvious where this is going, you still wonder about the motivations of the characters and their actions.

Then again, we are used to worse. The actors are good enough to pull you through it. The ending might swing some people towards the negative or positive side (depending on which side they were before). I think it's a thing you can't see entirely coming at you (at least that's what I think about it).

The now seemingly dead and buried subgenre of "New French Extremity" that gave us horror classics like "Inside", "Martyrs" and "Frontier(s)" was spearheaded almost completely by first-time filmmakers. Movies that the directing duo of Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo would go on to make after "Inside" provide us with a few clues as to why "New French Extremity" is now apparently extinct; it seems other first-timers of the NGE were also unable to follow up their early excesses.

The film is about a young trainee nurse who does her rounds with an older woman and is taken to the house of a comatose former ballet teacher. The older nurse confides in her young charge that the comatose woman may or may not have "treasure" hidden in the house. Unable to contain the burden of this privileged information, the young nurse immediately tells her criminal spouse about it, and with his moronic brother in tow, the threesome break into the house, looking for the "treasure".

This is a fairly basic set-up for a horror film, but it takes about one-third fo the movie's run-time to get going. Ample time, then, to think about some unanswered questions the movie raises, and would have been better advised to distract us from sooner. How, for example, does the older nurse even know about the "treasure"? Why does she tell the younger woman about it? This last question may be forgivable, because it is possible that if she DID know, she might tell; many people can't resist the urge to gossip. But the biggest question for me, which made me forget those two, is why these three criminals are willing to break into somebody's house for the vague promise of "treasure", which could be anything, might not even exist, and they might never find.

Our protagonist is not supposed to be stupid. She must know that once their breaking and entering has been discovered, she would be the prime suspect. Hell, the case is pretty open and shut, really: not only was she just let into the woman's house and shown around, the older nurse can also testify that she told her about the treasure, and then the house was broken into, almost immediately! Ridiculous.

Anyway, this movie isn't a true crime thriller, it's a horror movie, and that's what those that have seen it want it to be. So, forgetting those details, as a better filmmaker might have allowed us to: what of the horror? On that score, "Livide" is kind of in the middle between "Inside" and "Among the Living", the directors' next movie, in that "Inside" made perfect sense, "Among the Living" made very little, and "Livide" makes less sense than the first, and more than the latter... just barely.

While in the house, inevitably, the idiotic thieves are attacked by things/people who were remarkably absent when the nurses visited the house earlier that same day. There are a few toothless jump-scares, in which I again found myself questioning the behaviour of the people on screen, rather than feeling what they should have been feeling. Take, for example, one of the movie's earliest attempts at a scare, in which the criminals run across what looks like a group of children sitting around a table in the darkness. In a house that is supposed to be empty save for an elderly, bedridden woman, the apparition of children sitting in the dark ought to be scarier than it was, either to the characters on screen, or to us, watching them. It gets worse, though - after deciding that these figures are not real human beings, the head of one abruptly snaps around with the speed of a bear-trap. Yeah, they get scared, but again, nowhere near as much as real people would. After coming across something this bizarre, wouldn't you call it a day and quit? What else might be lurking in the shadows?

Like I said, the characters are idiots.

Obviously this is a horror movie, and almost all horror movies have characters who must ignore clear warnings and threats in order for the horror to do its thing. But in better movies, this is handled in such a way that we do not shake our heads at the protagonists' stupidity.

Toward the end, I found myself wishing that "Livide" had been made by another filmmaker; mayble Guillermo del Toro. The reason being that it features some interesting, disturbing images, like a young woman with her eyes stitched closed. It is also a fairly original take on the appearance of the vampire - no fangs here, just skin that looks like plaster.

The main problem with the movie is that it seems the filmmakers had no idea how to use their more interesting plot details, which are glimpsed in flashes of exposition that would be tantalising in skilled hands, but here seem like deliberate attempts to distract us from the story, which starts silly and ends nonsensical.

The sexy Chloé Coulloud plays Lucy, a world weary girl in her late teens troubled by the death of her mother. On the first day of her latest dead end job as a care-worker her irritating boss Wilson, played by Catherin Jacob, takes Lucy to a creepy old house and introduces her to a comatose patient named Jessel. Lucy learns that Jessel was once a renowned dance instructor who's daughter, Anna, died at a young age. Wilson hints at the family wealth and teases Lucy with rumours of treasure hidden somewhere in the mansion.

When Lucy's relays the story to dead-beat boyfriend William he persuades her and his brother Ben to accompany him to the house that night with the aim of finding the treasure.

Livid is both haunting and horrific in equal measure. Scenes are dimly lit, taking place almost exclusively at night and where the only source of light is a torch or flickering bulb. The Gothic mansion is a perfect set piece for the unfolding treasure hunt and much of the imagery presented within the peeling facade of its ancient walls will linger in your memory long after the film is finished. The photogenic Coulloud is perfect as the dazed female protagonist, her sultry eyes, permanent pout and expressive yet somehow dormant features will have your attention in every one of her scenes.

The first 80% of the movie is a wonderful addition to the haunted house genre, featuring some of the creepiest moments I've seen in a film of this type in a long time. Unfortunately, the story loses its way toward the end, uncertain how and where to finish, and wraps up with a series of ambiguous metaphors before spiralling out of control into full fairytale mode and throwing all previous suspension of disbelief down the can.

Despite this disappointment, the majority is well worth a watch, guaranteed to give you chills and have you on the edge of your seat. It's hard to inject this kind of blanket horror into a film and for the effort and achievement Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury deserve full credit. More, however, should definitely have been invested in a conclusion more befitting the rest of the film.