Cold Hell Review

Original Title: Die Hölle.
Release Date: 2017.
Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky.
Producers: Helmut Grasser, Thomas Peter Friedl and Stefan Arndt.
Written By: Martin Ambrosch .
Cast: Violetta Schurawlow, Tobias Moretti, Robert Palfrader and Sammy Sheik.
Running Time: 92 minutes.

Here we go again. Alfred Hitchcock’s often replicated but never duplicated Rear Window (1954) is recycled yet again, this time by director Stefan Ruzowitzky (Deadfall, The Counterfeiters). Full-time taxi driver, part-time Muay Thai boxer, Özge Dogruol (Violetta Schurawlow), witnesses a murder out her back window sparking a not-so discrete cat and mouse game between her and the killer (Sammy Sheik), which includes a pretty cool dust-up in a moving car.

All we want is to see is Özge beat the psycho senseless but instead what we get is a plot that drones on and on about Özge’s dysfunctional family life and the mind-numbing drama surrounding her cousin’s equally dysfunctional marriage.

Instead of Fists of Fury meets Silence of the Lambs we get Days of Our Lives.

Özge herself has two blank facial expressions and two moods throughout the entire film: indignant and even more indignant. As the movie opens, Özge is berated and assaulted by a bigoted taxi driver. We cheer her on as she kung fus the living crap out of the ass clown. As Cold Hell unspools though and we realize what a hard-hearted, unemotional android Özge is, we still stand in her corner but it hard to relate to her unless you are a moping, adolescent Goth kid fighting the conformist pigs.

DEATH AND DESPAIR! DEATH AND DESPAIR! DEATH AND DESPAIR!

The one character we do feel sorry for is Özge’s very young niece. She’s nothing more than a prop that’s passed around like an unwanted beach ball whenever the filmmakers decide they need to heighten the drama so they put the poor kid in danger. Now, if they had Özge train her in martial arts, made her into the Muay Thai Kid or something, we’d have a movie worth watching.

Wax on? No, wax off.

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