Chained for Life

A lengthy Pauline Kael quote about the good looks of actors ben­e­fit­ting cin­e­ma pre­cedes Aaron Schimberg’s Chained for Life. Its open­ing shot, of a young woman (Jess Weixler) nav­i­gat­ing a cor­ri­dor in a shell-shocked but glow­ing state, appears to com­ple­ment Kael’s musing.

Yet beau­ty is about to be imper­illed as this woman is actu­al­ly star­ring in a hor­ror movie. And then it’s quick­ly revealed that this hor­ror movie is with­in anoth­er movie, where notions of beau­ty and rep­re­sen­ta­tion of bod­ies that don’t fit soci­etal norms will be skew­ered to delight­ful effect.

Shar­ing its name with a con­joined twin mur­der mys­tery from 1952, Chained for Life is set around the pro­duc­tion of a film called The Unde­sir­ables, where dis­fig­ured or dis­abled peo­ple are hired to play test sub­ject patients at a mad surgeon’s hos­pi­tal. Activist-turned-actor Adam Pear­son – who has neu­rofi­bro­mato­sis, a con­di­tion that caus­es tumours to grow on nerves – had a mem­o­rable role in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, and he takes cen­tre stage here along­side Weixler.

The lat­ter plays a movie star appar­ent­ly slum­ming it in the low-bud­get schlock hor­ror Eng­lish-lan­guage debut of a report­ed­ly respect­ed Euro­pean auteur. ​‘Herr Direc­tor’, as he’s known, is played by Char­lie Korsmo with a thick Ger­man accent that recalls Wern­er Her­zog, which, in the con­text of the rest of the film, may be an allu­sion to Herzog’s own grotesque, dwarf-cast 1970 com­e­dy, Even Dwarfs Start­ed Small.

Chained for Life isn’t a patro­n­is­ing, didac­tic moral­i­ty tale about por­tray­als of the mar­gin­alised in cinema’s his­to­ry. The inter­play of the var­i­ous egos com­fort­ably places it in the com­pa­ny of François Truffaut’s Day for Night or Rain­er Wern­er Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore, two high­lights of the small genre of movies set on film sets where cast and crew from dif­fer­ent places on the peck­ing order try to make the best of chaot­ic situations.