MUST LOVE DEATH – Andreas Schaap

In Must Love Death, shown at the competition within the Ravenna Nightmare Film Fest 2009, we follow the action of poor Norman (the typical romantic nerd) who after being dismissed countless times comes across the girl who’ll turn out to be the love of his life. A threat to their love will come from her ex boyfriend, the typical nice guy acting in shallow tv series and winning women only thanks to his bank account and his fame rather than his appeal.

Norman, after another love defeat, decides the time has come for him to leave this world but he cannot find the courage to put an end to his life. After several unsuccessful attempts, he goes for a mass suicide with other suicidal wannabes, but he crashes against a different reality and he’ll be the only one to get hurt …

To find the appropriate definition for a music or film product in the hyperbroad commercial scene, is nowadays very difficult. The genres melt and mix up with one another making it difficult to detect clear boundaries: you get forced to use lists of tags to find the most suitable sub-sub-genre to define a work. Much better would be to “judge” it as a whole without careing about which genre it should belong to. As to Must Love Death though, the effort is worth, at least to understand where horror genre is going, genre which can be defined as classic even just referring to its longevity.

Andreas Schaap no doubt has been deeply influenced by the 80s school, and clear evidence can be found in the countless quotations (included some which won’t surely let Star Trek‘s fans down) from movies and tv series dating from that period, which enrich this only 90 minutes long movie. The director understood that those years, fortunately or not, had their time and he chose to ironize on that way of making movies this way giving to it, imho, the right prestige, rather than conveying nostalgic feelings. Afterall to handle nowadays plots coming from those years without inserting innovating elements can be boring and extremely pathetic.

Coming to en end it’s certainly strengthening to find (as to narrative styles) innovative solutions for a genre on which almost everything has been told. If it was me, I would’ve tried to better balance the switches from totally freaked out skits to the more dramatic scenes and I would’ve kept myself from repeating too many times the same jokes, vanishing this way their comical effect.

As a whole the movie gets good marks but not flying colors. A movie I suggest to watch with the friends of those “good old days“.

Director: Andreas Schaap
Cast: Sami Loris, Manon Kahle, Jeff Burrell