Everly (2014)

 

Content Warning: this film contains graphic torture and frequent references to sexual abuse.

Everly is a reluctant prostitute, trapped into sexual slavery and forced into working for the brutal, abusive criminal overlord, Taiko.  When Taiko learns that Everly has been talking to a police detective in an effort to bring down the operation and live a normal life with her daughter, he murders the cop and then dispatches his men to torture, rape and murder Everly.

Taiko has underestimated his target.  Although badly beaten, Everly manages to retrieve a gun she had hidden in her bathroom, and kills this initial group of attackers.

Taiko is far from finished with Everly, though.  He offers all the other prostitutes in the building a big reward for killing her, and also sends multiple additional waves of assassins to back them up.

This is clearly a film which had limited resources and has tried to use them as efficiently as possible.  Except for a handful of scenes, it takes place pretty much entirely within Everly's studio apartment, and the costume design has ensured that most of the enemies have their faces obscured, rendering it much easier to re-use the same smallish group of stunt people over and over.  

I think these methods do ultimately get stretched a bit too thin, but it's a brave effort to so physically constrain the story to maximise the budget available for other purposes.

So it's financially savvy, but is it any good?  Well ultimately, I think it falls a bit short of where it could have been, mostly because it overplays the gross-out factor about halfway through, and never really recovers from there.

About half an hour into Everly, I was having a good time.  After a rather rather rough opening scene, it had settled into a pleasingly over the top bit of action movie nonsense.  Salma Hayek's performance was anchoring the film well, and her dry, darkly comic interactions with 'Dead Man', an incapacitated but not quite deceased member of the first group of attackers gave the film a bit of humour.

And then the character called 'The Sadist' turns up, and the film takes an extended detour into Yikes-ville.  This is a deeply unpleasant bit of the film, without any of the (admittedly black) humour that comes before.  It brings the film's until then high octane momentum to a crashing and really quite gruesome halt.

I think a big part of the reason that the film struggles from this point, other than lingering nausea from that scene, is the remaining antagonists.    It's just more guys like before, plus Taiko himself. 

As a big bad, Taiko is too small a presence in the film, both in terms of how much we see him and in terms of being notably different from the enemies Everly has faced before.  He's just one more guy in a suit for her to kill, and while he's certainly a nasty piece of work, almost anyone would pale next to the awfulness of 'The Sadist'.