Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Søren Juul Petersen
Starring: Anne Bergfeld, Karin Michelsen, Damon Younger
Director Soren Juul Petersen's gruelling Danish thriller
The Ringmaster opens in similar fashion to James Whale's 1931
adaptation of Frankenstein, with an announcer warning the audience of the horrors we're about to
witness. It takes a certain level of confidence to promise your audience
such grisly delights. Whale's film delivered. Petersen's doesn't.
A mix of a mildly effective slowburn thriller and an immature piece of
torture porn, The Ringmaster plays out over the course of an
evening during which the Danish national team is competing in the final of
some unnamed sporting event. With the nation pre-occupied, it promises to be
a slow night for gas station workers Agnes (Anne Bergfeld), a bookish
psychology student whose father runs the joint, and the older, directionless
Belinda (Karin Michelsen).
Belinda bets that they get no more than three customers during their shift,
and she's right. First up is a weird but seemingly harmless oddball who
insists on speaking German. Later a pair of creepy young men arrive, with
one of them refusing Agnes's request to stop filming her with his camcorder.
When they leave, Belinda claims to have seen a woman with duct tape over her
mouth on the backseat of their car. Soon after, the two men return, parking
their car ominously across the street.
This slowburn stalking aspect of The Ringmaster might be
somewhat effective were it not inter-cut with flash-forwards that show us
how the night ultimately progressed. Agnes is tied to a chair on some sort
of stage, the subject of a live show being beamed to an audience of sickos
on the internet. An English speaking and accented man in clown make-up (Damon Younger, the Ringmaster of the title) proceeds to torture both Agnes and her
prone, unconscious boyfriend.
An unwelcome throwback to the exploitative shockers that clogged video
store shelves in the wake of Eli Roth's Hostel, The Ringmaster doesn't have an original idea in its head.
There's barely a plot here, and what little story there is doesn't tie
together in any coherent fashion. We know from the off that Agnes ends up
being menaced by the eponymous villain, but the movie never shows us just
how she ended up in his clutches. It almost feels like two different movies
have been crudely edited together, one of which is unfinished.
Is there really still a market for this sort of dross? I'm no prude, but I
just don't see the entertainment value in watching women being tortured in
gruesome fashion with no sufficient story to anchor such portrayals of
depravity. And boy, is The Ringmaster depraved, with the
lowlight seeing the pin of a name tag rammed through a nipple. Far from the
terrors promised by the onscreen announcer in the movie's prologue, all we
get are the juvenile antics of a filmmaker who really needs to grow
up.
