To start, this is most definitely not a film that you'd sit and watch for fun. That said, this is by far cult director Uwe Boll's most accomplished and mature work thus far, albeit a film that many will find hard to stomach.
Based on a shocking incident which occurred in a German jail in 2006, Boll uses the premise as an opportunity to launch a searing polemic against a system which locks men up like caged animals for 23 hours per day with nothing to do, in the name of punishment and then is somehow surprised and outraged when these men behave more like animals than human beings.
We get to watch, helpless as Mitch (Sipos, absolutely superb here), a quiet young man imprisoned for a petty criminal offence is bullied, brutalised, tortured and cruelly degraded as a human being over a period of 18 hours (or so) by his three cell-mates who began the day as his friends. A series of events that is set in motion by an ill-advised poker bet with a sprinkling of swaggering bravado soon gets way out of hand and swiftly descends into an insane pack-mentality, survival-of-the-fittest situation that cannot be stopped, simply because it has already gone too far. As you might imagine, this does not end happily.
Filmed on a shoestring budget in a grand total of two locations with almost all of the dialogue being improvised by almost-unrecognisable-from-his-T2-days Edward Furlong, the excellent (and probably destined for much bigger things) Sam Levinson, Steffen Mennekes (who gives a memorable turn as the mentally-unstable German skinhead, Jack) and the aforementioned Shaun Sipos, Stoic takes the audience on a raw, intense, brutal and emotionally-draining journey into the pitch-black heart of the human condition and graphically portrays the most base, animalistic aspects of Man's nature as they explosively erupt to the surface, as they tend to when people freed from all concepts of personal responsibility.
Stoic contains graphic violence and scenes of a disturbing and upsetting nature, however I must credit Dr. Boll for his restraint and sensitivity towards the subject matter here. It would've been all too easy to film Stoic as some sort of tacky exploitation/torture porn flick, using Mitch's suffering as entertainment for a horror audience. Instead, he gave us something entirely different - something that leaves the audience completely drained, numb with shock at the end and with little option but to sit and contemplate the events just witnessed (think Gaspar Noé's Irréversible or Takashi Miike's Audition for the effect I'm talking about). For that, I salute him.
If Uwe Boll is ever going to win an award (a good award, not a Razzie) for one of his movies, this will be the one.
Based on a shocking incident which occurred in a German jail in 2006, Boll uses the premise as an opportunity to launch a searing polemic against a system which locks men up like caged animals for 23 hours per day with nothing to do, in the name of punishment and then is somehow surprised and outraged when these men behave more like animals than human beings.
We get to watch, helpless as Mitch (Sipos, absolutely superb here), a quiet young man imprisoned for a petty criminal offence is bullied, brutalised, tortured and cruelly degraded as a human being over a period of 18 hours (or so) by his three cell-mates who began the day as his friends. A series of events that is set in motion by an ill-advised poker bet with a sprinkling of swaggering bravado soon gets way out of hand and swiftly descends into an insane pack-mentality, survival-of-the-fittest situation that cannot be stopped, simply because it has already gone too far. As you might imagine, this does not end happily.
Filmed on a shoestring budget in a grand total of two locations with almost all of the dialogue being improvised by almost-unrecognisable-from-his-T2-days Edward Furlong, the excellent (and probably destined for much bigger things) Sam Levinson, Steffen Mennekes (who gives a memorable turn as the mentally-unstable German skinhead, Jack) and the aforementioned Shaun Sipos, Stoic takes the audience on a raw, intense, brutal and emotionally-draining journey into the pitch-black heart of the human condition and graphically portrays the most base, animalistic aspects of Man's nature as they explosively erupt to the surface, as they tend to when people freed from all concepts of personal responsibility.
Stoic contains graphic violence and scenes of a disturbing and upsetting nature, however I must credit Dr. Boll for his restraint and sensitivity towards the subject matter here. It would've been all too easy to film Stoic as some sort of tacky exploitation/torture porn flick, using Mitch's suffering as entertainment for a horror audience. Instead, he gave us something entirely different - something that leaves the audience completely drained, numb with shock at the end and with little option but to sit and contemplate the events just witnessed (think Gaspar Noé's Irréversible or Takashi Miike's Audition for the effect I'm talking about). For that, I salute him.
If Uwe Boll is ever going to win an award (a good award, not a Razzie) for one of his movies, this will be the one.