The Last House on the Left (2009)

Here we have a film about a family of fugitives who abduct two teenagers, kill one, rape the other, and then take shelter in the home of the second girl's parents, who proceed to exact a revenge involving a hammer, a shower rod, and a microwave. The 2009 remake of Wes Craven's 1972 provocation arrives with a larger budget, a Cape Town shooting schedule standing in for an American lake town, and a director who has publicly stated his desire to avoid the excesses of torture porn. It is a grisly piece of work, and it knows it. What it does not know, or care to know, is anything about the social questions that occupy the modern cultural conversation. The cast is uniformly white. Race is never raised. No character wrestles with identity, capital, or the climate. The film has one thing on its mind, which is the capacity of ordinary people to do terrible things when pushed, and it pursues that single idea with a grim, unbothered focus.

This is not, we should be clear, a failing. The picture is a genre exercise, and a competent one. It sets up its swimmer protagonist, her doting physician father, her watchful mother, and then it unleashes a nightmare that the parents must answer with whatever is within reach. The violence is intimate and ugly. The rape is filmed to be unbearable, not titillating, a deliberate choice the director has discussed at length. There is no sermon waiting at the end, no lesson about systems or structures, no invitation to examine our complicity in anything larger than the human appetite for cruelty. It simply ends, with a man's head in a microwave, and the family sailing toward a hospital.

We are left, then, with a film that scores nothing on the index of contemporary cultural instruction. It offers no representation agenda, no identity discourse, no critique of wealth or environment. It is a remake of a notorious exploitation picture, made with more money and better lighting, and it asks nothing of us but our nerves.