The PIFFF is back, and began with the new film by Joseph Kahn: Ick.
For its 13th edition, the PIFFF (or Paris International Fantastic Film Festival) has decided to dedicate its opening to one of its favorite filmmakers: Joseph Kahn. A gifted clipper from the 2000s and 2010s (we owe him some major videos by Britney Spears, Eminem, Ice Cube and Taylor Swift), he closed the studio door after the failure of the nevertheless brilliant Torque, a sort of Fast & Furious decadent whose exciting behind-the-scenes Mathieu recounted on video.
Following this setback which was difficult to digest, Kahn subsequently remained on the independent side, and impressed in quick succession with Detention et Bodied (both passed at PIFFF). It was therefore logical that Ickhis new “family” horror film (in the author's words) begins its festivities in Paris.
Ick Cream
This time, it's about Hank (Brandon Routh, who reminds us how much we missed him), a somewhat failed science teacher, stuck in his hometown of Eastbrook. In around ten virtuoso minutes, Kahn traces the trajectory of a wasted life, where Hank was destined for a future as a great American footballer before breaking his leg.
With the madness of his editing, which seems to offer one idea per shot or an improbable transition, the director tells a planned tragedy, an American dream which could only end badly. From there, Hank is stuck in the past and his remorseto the sound of a joyfully cheesy soundtrack from the 2000s.
-But he is not the only one to let himself go, since the whole town seems rather indifferent to the gradual invasion of a plant, nicknamed Ickwhich quickly turns into a concrete Blob-style threat. Kahn knows his classics in terms of the monster film and the body-snatcher, and has the merit of letting paranoia infuse all the layers of his story.
From then on, the Ick becomes a fairly versatile metaphorical element, symbolizing as much the risks of a deadly nostalgia (which keeps its victims in the errors of the past) as the stupidity of a population unconscious in the face of the health risks of the MAGA trend.
This is both the main quality of the film and its major flaw: Kahn's boundless and bulimic energy regularly shows himself to be a virtuoso, even if it means wallowing in excess. Between Hank's quest for paternity, the adolescent torments of the secondary characters and the highly contemporary satirical elements (it's difficult not to think of the Americans' management of Covid), Ick wants to do many things at once.
It sometimes makes him confused, and even a little boomer around the edges, but he fervently embraces his outdated aesthetic and his loser hero lost at the beginning of the century. We are far from the mastery of his previous feature films, and at the same time, difficult not to have deep sympathy for this generous proposal.
PIFFF 2024 takes place from December 4 to 10 at the Max Linder Panorama in Paris.
