Sunday, September 25, 2022

Zero Avenue – review


Director: Daniel Frei

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

I considered that this might be a case of a film using vampire tropes but there was enough within to convince me that this is actually a vampire film – though the vampire in it is unusual. A low budget effort there is a reliance on the two main performers and the dialogue to carry the film and it achieves that.

It starts with a man, Joshua (Braeson Herold), walking through New York streets. After passing by one woman (Nancy Ozelli), the camera’s interest suggesting she may be important, he spots a woman, Veronica (Allison Siko), and heads towards her.

Allison Siko as Veronica

Veronica enters a restaurant and, after looking through the window, Joshua follows. He approaches her and spins a story about being a tourist who has left his bag on the train – including phone and money – and being unable to find somewhere. His demeanour is funny, perhaps overly chatty to hide shyness but feels sinister to the viewer. She is dismissive at first but, when he tells her where he wishes to go, she does tell him how to get there. He leaves but turns back and compliments her before leaving again. She stops him and says she’ll show him the way.

dominant

After a while she stops and points to a building and says that it is her home and invites him in. The apartment is a private one within a hotel and she offers him a drink. His goofy dialogue continues as he talks about pop/soda but she makes it clear that it is alcohol – whisky in fact – that is on offer. He drinks it and she removes her top, revealing lingerie beneath, he makes a remark and is slapped across the face… her demeanour changed she dominates, is violent, forces him to the bedroom and, straddling him, chokes him.

eyes bleeding

Afterwards we discover that she is a prostitute and this was a fantasy he paid for. The apartment is his and it was all set up to fulfil a fantasy on his birthday. She is about to leave when he becomes suddenly ill, he goes to the bathroom and vomits and she talks about getting him to a hospital – as his eyes are bleeding. He passes out but when he comes round she is still there. The film then follows them as his story comes out, and his plan, and every time it goes wrong he manipulates her into believing that things had not got weird (suggesting she slept or banged her head, thus gaslighting her). 

his fridge

So what is going on and why is he a vampire? Well, he is 400-years old (he admits this and then changes it to 40 but feels like 400) and his fridge is filled with blood – cows blood, he suggests but also says he uses it, mixed with other ingredients, as his sustenance as he dislikes solid food. He is immortal and at one point deliberately cuts his hand to show it healing (there are scars that are left behind after the heal). All his points towards a vampire or the use of genre tropes.

Braeson Herold as Joshua

The thing that made him ill was a dose of saffron in the whisky as it is the only thing that can harm him (she dosed him on instruction). When we get the backstory we discover that his mother (McLean Peterson) was a wise woman who wanted a child and conceived with a supernatural entity (Bj Gruber), the price was an annual blood sacrifice for the life of the child. She then hid him for forty years but on his 40th birthday his father gave him a choice – kill his mother and live or chose to die. He killed his mother.

Veronica and Joshua

Centuries on and he wants to die. On his birthday his father will often bring the reincarnation of his mother to him (the inference being she becomes the annual sacrifice). There is some discussion about the soul being made up of parts of older souls and this gives an out of the obvious question around how the mother could be returned year after year, in adult form, as a reincarnation. He has tried to set things up so that he can reverse the curse, bring his mother back to life and he die in her place – Veronica is, he believes, a reincarnation of his mother.

a surreal moment

It was the dialogue and performances that carried this, much more than the story. Don’t get me wrong it was an interesting tale and concept, but it probably would have fallen flat if it were not for the performances and both actors really gave their all. Quite unusual in lore and pretty surreal in places, the filmmakers might not have meant this to be a vampire film but the tropes they used were too plentiful to ignore. 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

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