Fantasia 2009: Andreas Schaap’s Must Love Death

A theme at this year’s Fantasia Film Festival is “Flirting With Chaos”, or ‘the anti-romantic comedy’. Must Love Death, which had its world premiere at the fest, fits nicely into this mold as German writer/director Andreas Schaap delivers a first feature film that’s kind of like a twisted date movie that both parties can enjoy.

The story follows the hapless Norman (Sami Loris), as he depressingly moves through life until he is hit by the car of the beautiful young Jennifer (Manon Kahle), who’s got some troubles of her own.  The two hit it off and spark up a nice relationship until a misunderstanding with Jennifer’s boorish on-off boyfriend (Philipp Rafferty) is the last straw in a series of events leading Norman to some dark thoughts.  Norman answers an add for a group where four strangers agree to commit suicide together, but it takes a turn for the worse and Norman is forced to fend for his life against a couple of torturous, though incompetent, murderers (Jeff Burrell and Peter Farkas).

Must Love Death could have been a disaster had it started out as a romantic comedy that turned into a “torture porn” horror flick halfway through.  Instead, Schaap smartly mixes the two together through the use of flashbacks and story jumps, and it works well.  While the film is a little rough around the edges technically – it was, after all, Schaap’s final film school project, though he did say that he got a good grade for it – the mostly non-English cast do a great job of hiding their accents and the story is actually rather endearing, if you can get past the blood and torture (but hey, this is a Fantasia film…where would it be without blood and torture?).

Schaap definitely wears his influences on his sleeves, and it’s easy to see some nods to early Sam Raimi (Evil Dead), Peter Jackson (Dead Alive), and of course Eli Roth’s Hostel, but the film is also reminiscent of some of David O. Russell’s early quirky comedies, such as Flirting With Disaster and Spanking the Monkey.  Mixing romantic comedy and horror is no easy task, but Must Love Death does so with relative ease, making for a twisted, genre-bending thrill-ride of a date movie.