Saint Bernard is a 2019 surreal fantasy horror film about a classical musical conductor who unravels into the abyss of insanity.
Avant-garde cinema is nearly as old as movies themselves, having begun in Europe in the early 1920s where experimental filmmaking pushed against traditional styles, giving artists free reign to explore their imaginations without the constrictions of typical narrative methods. Films with astonishingly odd characters, awkward camera angles, disturbing imagery, strange music and more give the art its look and feel, sometimes making them extremely hard to watch, though not without significance.
Director Gabriel Bartalos‘ wickedly absurd Saint Bernard is a long-in-the-works film that is to an almost exaggerated degree, decidedly avant-garde, a film that is, for any outside his immediate circle of influence, perhaps entirely indecipherable, tracking the visceral adventures of a white-tuxedo-wearing conductor carrying the head of a Saint Bernard in a canvas bag while navigating the ins and outs of modern day life. It’s designed to be outrageous, to make you to look away, to force you to think about what it means. For most though, I’m betting it’ll be just a test if they can get through the first fifteen minutes.
This is a film that begins with an uncooked roasted chicken strapped to a parachute ready to jump from an airplane; men dressed as Abraham Lincoln, Ben Franklin, and Andrew Jackson fighting over a kite in a back alley parking lot; a man morphing into a giant grotesque floating pupa (moments after his head violently explodes) and drive away; a police station with floors made entirely of empty wine bottles where nobody helps, and so much more. It’s a collage of madness that is clearly ripe for interpretation, every single frame packed with weirdness and paranoia that it nearly defies explanation.
It’s here where I would normally layout the plot of the film being reviewed, but it would be impossible to do so with Saint Bernard, the movie a collection of loosely connected events that are a combination of eerie dreamlike sequences and obvious fantasy, every once in while sort of reconnecting to a flimsy sense of reality. We follow a guy named Bernard (Jason Dugre), who has a passion for conducting music, but has surely slipped off the pedestal and fallen into the abyss of insanity, everything he sees and touches woven into a sickening tapestry of almost hallucinogenic lunacy. Hardly a word is spoken as he transitions (portals?) from one bizarre set piece to another that features increasingly more creepy characters and murky neurosis.
By the time you meet “static boy,” a two dimensional, six-foot tall figure in the shape of feces with static humming TV eyes and a propensity to expel waste at volcanic speeds, well … you start to wonder about the choices you’ve made in your life. That’s probably the point. Part of me wanted to run from this movie, and hard, it being so aggressive in its effort to repel that I just about gave up. Yet it was at each and every one of these points where this happened that Bartalos did something clever, be it a unique visual, auditory cue, or symbolic gesture that had me thinking, “Huh. That feels sort of important.” How often does that ever happen in a movie?
When none other than Warwick Davis appears and climbs down from atop a pile of chopped wood and asks, “What did you wanna be?” the film begins to take some resemblance of shape and I finally found myself assigning meaning to what I was watching. Did it all makes sense? No, of course not. I image it would take several viewings to even come close to ‘seeing’ what Bartalos is up to and I doubt I have the mental fortitude to even try. This is a maddening experience that was still strangely satisfying for its inventive storytelling and fascinating production design that led me to a deeply troubling ending that is both harrowing and tragic for what it implies. I actually felt that I ‘got’ what it was about and was suddenly overcome by a disheartening sadness, everything that came before crystalizing into a shattered image of childhood trauma. Will it be for everyone? Not for a moment, but for those willing to let it get under their skin, it’ll count for the strangest thing seen this year on screen.
NOTE: Saint Bernard is a film that absolutely resists critical review, the standards for awarding ‘stars’ right out the window in properly offering readers any way to judge if this is something they might enjoy. As such, my rating here is based on my own unique experience and interpretation, one that was shaped by how I felt when it reached its end, including how creative and impactful the sets and atmosphere left me as the credits rolled. You will no doubt feel entirely different and as such should not rely on my rating as you might normally do.