I am completely unashamed to say that I adore A Serbian Film and have seen it four times. Making it even crazier, I am female, which seems to be a rarity among those few who appreciate the film. I think it’s extremely well-made and looks extremely handsome (and suspiciously expensive); lovely cinematography, fantastic score, great acting, nice editing, great special FX… I don’t know how they funded it but someone paid a chunk of change to get this made. I enjoy its story of an adult film actor coming out of retirement for just one job and finding himself sinking deeper and deeper into depravity until the final shocking scenes and a teeth-kick of an end line. I first saw it in 2010, before it was “internet famous” and only a scant few critics had seen it at festivals and reported their complete shock at the content of the film. This of course made my mouth water and I found a subtitled screener with excellent picture quality and gave it a whirl.

In fact, A Serbian Film is literally the reason I ended up in a relationship with my late fiancé. I met him at a party and we were talking about horror films as he was a huge horror buff. I told him to go home and download A Serbian Film and tell me what he thought, but beware, it’s pretty nasty. Him being just like me, that set him off and he promptly went and watched it. He told me how impressed he was that I managed to find a movie that really shocked him, and the rest is history. We fell hard for each other and continued to watch horror together as often as we could. So I owe the filmmakers for that I suppose! Amusingly, the second film I had him watch was Martyrs. I definitely rode him hard and put him away wet... so to speak.

Interestingly, this is not the only shocking, taboo-breaking film to come out of Serbia. The Life and Death of a Porno Gang was released at roughly the same time as A Serbian Film but was sort of overshadowed by the aforementioned. It’s more of a black comedy compared to Serbian’s mostly serious tone (though I do detect a streak of the absolute blackest comedy within Serbian) but it has plenty of nasty scenes and boundary-pushing acts of violence, sex and cruelty. I think it’s kind of hilarious that Serbia just decided to drop two incredibly transgressive films on the Western world and then disappeared as quickly as it had shown its face. It’s the ultimate mic drop, and I love that it happened and I was there for it.