On Tuesday, May 17, the Cannes International Film Festival began. The first evening opened with the screening of the French film out of competition “Cut!”
Two years after “The Forgotten Prince,” Michel Hazanavicius presented the world with his new film in a genre previously unexplored in his directing career. Indeed, “Cut!” is a horror comedy, a remake of the Japanese film “One Cut of the Dead” by Shin’ichirō Ueda. For 1 hour and 50 minutes, it portrays the making of a low-budget horror film directed by a “cheap, fast, and average” filmmaker played by Romain Duris.
The first part of the film showcases this horror short film where the director aims to bring his actors as close to horror as possible by shooting in a location that turns the living into the undead. The film deliberately embodies the absurd, the gore, and the heaviness by taking and twisting the typical conventions of horror films with characters and scenes that have been seen before.
In the second part, Hazanavicius traces the creation of this horror short film, from the choice of the director to the shooting of the final scene. With the background, the scenes shown in the first part make sense and become particularly comical. What you see are no longer the classic characters and scenes of the horror genre, but credible actor profiles and a series of filming mishaps.
In “Cut!” Michel Hazanavicius pays tribute to horror film enthusiasts by playing with the genre’s flaws and mixing in the crazy but not impossible creation of a film that turns into a funny and unsettling horror parody.
The film is set to be released in theaters on Wednesday, May 18.
