A raw queer melodrama wrapped in the bold lights and thin clothing of giallo. Based on the reputation this has as a neo-noir film, I was expecting something much campier and more genre heavy. This is both remarkably restrained for all its style, and thoughtful on when to push into metatext and ambiguity. The typical giallo standards of passion and violence are layered over more intimate and destructive forces: lost love, obsessive desires, suppressed wants, denied identities. Gonzalez is careful never to dip fully into blunt allegory or psychoanalysis, content to contend with characters whose emotions and actions are as plainly ordinary as they are devastating.
This is explicitly about sex work and porn but less because it's interested in those particular industries than them being one of the few places where queer people can be themselves, and how that momentary freedom is warped and turned back against them by a society that is still rooted in cis-heteronormativity. It's in the inaction of the cops, the voyeurism baked into the films, and the easy dismissal of people who can no longer work. In spite of that, there are still pockets of queer joy; the euphoria of dancing in a club, of finding your people, that only makes the tragedy hit harder when the lights come on.
As much as this is about queerness it's also about movies, particularly how they can exploit and coop stories that aren't there's to tell. The porn movies that have made our lead director so popular are also explicitly recreations of real tragedies, trading in the simulated suffering of the dead for a heightened salaciousness. I was thinking a lot about true crime media watching this, and how easy it is to turn one person's grief into commercial content. Again, Knife + Heart avoids didactics, but the parallels and pain are unavoidable. The ending reveal does something very interesting with the usually dreadful "abused become abusers" trope, which I'll need more time to ruminate on before I can say anything approaching insightful.
Every Netflix show wishes it could look this good. So funny that they got M83 to do the soundtrack, France's only edm artist.
Content warnings: murder, sexual assault, blood, anti-gay hate crime, death by fire, death by stabbing