Review: Black Heaven

Country: France

Genre: Thriller, Action/Adventure

Run time: 100 minutes

Director: Gilles Marchand

Starring: Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet, Louise Bourgoin, Pauline Etienne

Produced by: Haut et Court

On a trip to the beach, Gaspard (Leprince-Ringuet) and his girlfriend Marion (Etienne) find a cell phone. Their quest to return the phone to its rightful owner, Audrey (Bourgoin) leads them all over town and up into a quarry where they find Audrey and her companion mid-suicide attempt. They pull her out of her smoke-filled car and Gaspard finds and stashes a handheld camera that had recorded her entire attempt. On the camera, Audrey talks about going to the Black Beach and Gaspard quickly discovers that she is talking about a place in an online live-action game called Black Hole. Within the game, players create an avatar that wanders around a Gotham-like city called Black Hole where when players die (which is often, the city is rife with violence), they temporarily go to the beach. As Gaspard delves deeper and deeper into the mechanics of the game and Audrey’s way of life, he discovers a singer in the video game, named Sam, who he believes is Audrey’s avatar. As Marion quickly vanishes from Gaspard’s mind and seducing Audrey via talking with Sam becomes his top priority, Gaspard becomes entangled in a complex web of sex, slavery, murder, and suicide. The film culminates on the rooftop of Audrey’s penthouse when Audrey’s lifestyle falls apart and she and Gaspard have to suffer the consequences.

The complex plot of Black Heaven questions where the line between real life and fantasy lies, going so far as to suggest that in modern times, the influence and importance of the internet means that the line does not exist at all. In fact, Black Heaven’s best quality is that it questions the lines between many subjects. When Gaspard discovers that Audrey and her brother Vincent use the game to trick lonely players into a false joint suicide attempt, he struggles with the idea that technically, Audrey is a murderer. However, his attraction to her overpowers his fear of what she and her brother could do to him and he uses his avatar, who looks and sounds nothing like him, to convince the player behind Sam to have sex with him. Unfortunately for Gaspard, the player controlling Sam is not Audrey but her violent brother Vincent, who lures him into coming to their apartment so he can try to kill him. The multiple platforms on which the characters communicate complicate what seems like a simple question of life and death. The indestructibility of the players within the game encourages them to take risks that they otherwise would not consider, like breaking into a house to go swimming and spend the night. The fact that players can come back from “death” in Black hole gives Audrey and Gaspard a feeling of invincibility that is expressed not only in the plot but through the cinematography as well.

The “world within a world” created by the game is reflected in how Audrey tapes her suicide attempts and the audience sees them in a shot over Gaspard’s shoulder as he watches them on TV. The theme of a screen being showed on screen is repeated in the many shots of the video game on a computer screen, but the video game’s flat texture and monochromatic color scheme make the video game shots boring. Though this may be done intentionally to emphasize that the video game is different from the vivid colors of Gaspard’s and Audrey’s real lives, the game’s matte appearance is not on par with the highly thought-out camerawork of the rest of the film. The most striking shot of the film is from inside the car when Audrey and her brother/owner Vincent (it is known that she is technically a slave, but the story behind how she became one is never revealed) are in the car with their friends outside in a rock quarry. The group is playing chicken; Audrey rides along while Vincent steers the car towards their friends to see who dives out of the way first. After each try, Vincent reverses the car while looking straight ahead and it seems that Audrey and Vincent are stuck in rewind. The shot makes it look like they have the ability to go back in time, demonstrating the mentality of lack of permanence embraced by the players. In the game, as well as in their lives, nothing is for sure and anything can be undone; suicide can be committed again and again and players can cross between life and death whenever they please. This way of thinking instills a fearlessness in all of the characters, even minor ones, but death eventually catches up with Audrey. Unlike in the opening scene of the film, where Audrey’s avatar jumps off a building and gracefully falls through the air, when Audrey jumps off her apartment building at the end of the film, she lands broken on the concrete below. Between these two parallel scenes, the movie is full of shaky camerawork that reflects the stress felt by the two main characters and an eerie but overplayed theme song that becomes more comedic and grating as the film progresses. The frequency of long takes and tracking shots makes the real-life scenes more credible but the underdevelopment of characters like Marion and a lack of information about Audrey’s past and motivations leave the audience confused at points. Some editing changes concerning backstory would make the film easier to watch and connect the audience more with the film.

Black Heaven is not as thrilling as its plot suggests because of its bland mis-en-scene and vague characters, but it is deliberately shot and asks more questions than it answers. It effectively explores the themes of life and death, fantasy and reality, and how the four mix, and leaves it up to the viewer to decide who is to blame for the suicides of the players of Black Hole and deaths of major characters. It brings into question the overuse and abuse of addictive media platforms like live-action role playing games while remaining, for the most part, objective.