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Review

Maria Beatty is well known for her forays into the feminine sexual mystique. For well over a decade Beatty has made a slew of films with deeply noir-ish sensibilities, a dark sexually charged atmosphere and a high brow approach to what could easily be exploitative in the wrong hands. As her career has progressed so has the maturity of her films. Beatty’s latest effort shows a reaching out to a different audience than her previous films.

Bandaged takes place in a an unknown time, giving the film stylistic elements from all over without beating the viewer over the head with visual cues. Lucille (played by Janna Lisa Dombrowsky) is a repressed teenage girl living with her authoritarian father (played by Hans Piesbergen) in an estate with only her grandmother as company. Tensions between the father and daughter escalate until the daughter in a fit of depressed rage, mutilates herself with acid. The father, a well known plastic surgeon, keeps Lucille at the house and plans to rebuild her face using the dark methods he’s developed in his basement. It is then that Ingride (Martine Erhel) the nurse enters the picture. After being hired by the father to care for Lucille, the sexual tension between Lucille and Ingride grows until a thickly sensual love scene occurs. They are able to keep their secret until Grandma discovers their forbidden love.

Bandaged is not what this reviewer would call a “horror” movie in the traditional sense. There is very little sense of suspense or impending terror involved in the movie. There is however a genuine electricity created between Dombrowsky and Erhel. This is exemplified by one scene in particular in Lucy, while still in bandages (a nod to Beatty’s fetishistic past), allows Ingride to soothe an itch. There is not a lick of skin shown, but the raw sensuality of the scene was more arousing than any half baked porn. If you enjoy Beatty’s style and sex-smoldering-under-the-surface sensuality this will be a film for you. It shows that Beatty can maintain her connections to her past catalogue while creating more mainstream story driven film.

 -- Sean McCallum