Stephen Dorff and Emile Hirsch star in the latest film from Ryûhei Kitamura. Kitamura is best known to English-speaking countries for The Midnight Meat Train. His latest film, The Price We Pay, closed the Sunday portion of Arrow Video FrightFest, In The Price We Pay, Dorff and Hirsch play criminals who find themselves in over their heads. After a robbery goes wrong, the pair take in a hostage, Grace (Gigi Zambado). Their plan to lay low runs into problems after the getaway car breaks down. Left with no other option, they seek shelter at a nearby farmhouse. The residents however, are hiding their own secret.
Almost every story adheres to the three-act structure. But whilst many follow the traditional beginning, middle, and end, The Price We Pay does something different. Each act in Kitamura’s film seems to have been lifted from a separate story. What starts as a crime thriller for the first act, shifts into torture porn territory for the middle, before going full Texas Chain Saw for the final act. It’s a lot of changes to take in and the transitions from one nightmare to another don’t go as smoothly as they could. Those that need a coherent narrative will be left wanting. The story doesn’t quite line up as one would hope and the lack of cohesion becomes frustrating. Nonetheless, Kitamura does offer up enough variety to win over a broad spectrum of the horror audience.
WIth so much time given to challenging audience expectations, the characters themselves are left underdeveloped. Stephen Dorff’s Cody is the archetypical good soldier abandoned by his country and forced into a life of crime. From the very start, it’s clear that he’s not a bad guy to be feared. Kitamura vocalises this through Cody’s words, but also his appearance. When we first meet him, Cody is wearing a flannel shirt, one not too dissimilar to that of the hostage, Grace. It effortlessly communicates hidden allegiances, adding some shallow layers to the complexity of the piece. Hirsh is also an atypical character, His role of Alex is included to present some early antagonism. Alex is a dime a dozen movie bad boy through and through. Kitamura pushed the character even further by imbuing him with a silly quirk. Alex has a penchant for dice rolling, one that Hirsch portrays with the same fevered intensity as Batman foe Two-Face and his coin. The overuse of the dice quickly loses its appeal and the audience bay for his blood from very early on.
Gigi Zambado plays the thorn between these warring roses as heroine Grace. Just as with Cody and Alex, Grace has no real progression. Grace is a character whose purpose is to bind the story together, but she falls by the wayside. Too much time is spent darting from scene to scene and character to character, and so direct relationships are never really formed. The faction the three find themselves warring against could have been lifted from any number of hicksploitation movies and whilst they don’t further anything, their inclusion does at least guarantee some bloody effects.
As with the script, Kitamura throws everything he can at The Price We Pay on a technical level. Reflecting the unstable nature of their surroundings, Kitamura introduces a strange judder effect at several key moments. Its use feels out of place with the visual style of the rest of the film, but does at least add a point of interest. The style of The Price We Pay shifts throughout, echoing the ever changing nature of the three act structure. On one hand, this all works to keep the viewer on their toes, but on the other, it makes everything a bit confusing and hard to comprehend. The pacing is slow through act one and two, and then suddenly during act three, blisters through to the end. It’s as if Kitamura and company suddenly remembered they were making a film and quickly rushed to end it. Were The Price We Pay to be a little punchier at the start, and a fraction slower at the end, it would have made for a more well-rounded story. As it stands The Price We Pay gets lost amongst its own noise and struggles to be anything other than only mildly entertaining.
The Price We Pay
Summary
Kitamura dismantles the three act structure in favour of a three film structure, which inevitably misses the mark.
The Price We Pay was reviewed at Arrow Video FrightFest 2022. The Price We Pay is out on Digital from 16th October 2023.
