Brimstone 4K 2016 Ultra HD 2160p

A triumphant epic about survival and a story of powerful women, resistance against brutality on earth. Our heroine Liz (Dakota Fanning) from the wild and beautiful - pursued by the vengeful Shepherd (Guy Pearce). Devilish intrigues and twisted plot, who will survive?

Brimstone 4K Review
A dumb young woman named Elizabeth (Dakota Fanning) lives in the Wild West with her husband, daughter and stepson. When she helps a neighbor with a difficult birth, she has to kill the baby in order to save the mother's life. A local preacher (Guy Pearce) finds out about this, and he begins to terrorize Liz, going far beyond the usual church censures.

Even the toughest American directors who make films about the Wild West feel nostalgia for a time often considered the ultimate embodiment of national individualism. Martin Culhoven, however, is not an American, but a Dutch director, and his new picture did not become Hollywood because it was filmed in English with overseas stars. Therefore, "Underworld" is completely devoid of nostalgia. The Wild West in her appears not as a romantic era, but as a nightmarish, truly terrifying time of endless and widespread abuse of women.

"Underworld" lasts almost two and a half hours, and all this time can be divided into two parts - bloody violence, mostly male, and tense expectation when a man picks up a gun, revolver, knife or whip. The epic length of the tape is used by Kulhoven to turn Inferno into a compendium of brutal, sophisticated, and often perverse bullying. Psychological torture, rape, sadistic sex on the verge of murder, self-mutilation, slow and quick reprisals, executions, beatings ... And as a particularly disgusting cherry on the bloody cake - incest with minors.

True, not all of the above is shown in close-up, and it cannot be said that Kulhoven, along with the cameraman, savor every terrible scene. Sometimes the camera turns away, and the audience only hears screams of terrible pain. But what the film shows, and what it implies, is enough to get many viewers out of the room.

The film was shot entirely in Europe - in Spain, Hungary, Germany and Austria. The director hoped that Hollywood would invest in the film, but he could only agree on European funding.
Does it all make sense? Yes, but not much of it. There are only two ideas in the film: “Violence against women and girls is unacceptable” and “Absolute power absolutely corrupts”. By "absolute power" in this case we mean all forms of power of a man over a woman: the power of the husband, the power of the father, the power of the policeman, the power of the preacher, and even the power of the client in the brothel. The Nameless Preacher personifies many of these forms of depraved power, but there are other men in the film who behave similarly. And even those few characters who, against the background of the Preacher, seem to be angels, according to the Hamburg account, are by no means impeccable. The film makes it clear that The Preacher, for all his outrageous mania, is by no means an exception to the rule. The villain could well repeat the words from the famous picture: "We are not like that - this is how life is!"

Guy Pearce and his on-screen partner, Dutch star Karis van Houten, had an affair during filming. Their son was born in August 2016
If the men of the "Underworld" appear almost exclusively as torturers, then women are divided into those who dutifully accept the bullying, and those who try to escape or fight back. Liz is one of the latter, and the painting celebrates her tenacity and her unyielding spirit. However, a strong character does not protect the heroine from anything, and mostly villains play with her like cats and mouse. The film does not even end with a happy ending, although there are still notes of optimism in the epilogue.

Is this a strong movie? Indisputably. But perhaps too strong. Already by the middle of it, you stop worrying about the heroines, since the picture exhausts the mental limit of the audience's experience, piling up one scene of suffering on another. So you spend the second half of Hell, nervously snorting at each new round of sadism and glancing at your watch with the thought: "When will this torture end ?!"

If Culhoven wanted the audience to stop looking at the Wild West through rose-colored glasses, then his tape fulfills this task, and she does this with the help of a talentedly constructed gloomy image, an even darker plot and charismatic acting. But it was possible to reveal this topic much faster and without the Babylonian tower of pain, which would attract more maniacs than normal spectators, and without Kulhoven who knows that torturing and killing women is not good.