Cadaver (Kadaver) Review (Film, 2020)
content warning: death by suicide, gore, sexual content
It is the end of the world after a nuclear disaster. The survivors are struggling, digging through abandoned buildings for what little supplies remain. Leo, Jacob, and their daughter Alice are invited to attend a play at a luxury hotel that includes a free meal. It is pure spectacle, a bright spot in the lives of a suffering people, though the show itself proves far more trying.
Cadaver is a horror film from Norway, written and directed by Jarand Herdal and produced by Netflix. There’s a certain level of cynicism in contemporary horror from this area. Take what you see at face value. If a horror film says there are trolls or mermaids or vampires, there are trolls or mermaids or vampires. The cynicism is towards society and what people are willing to do to maintain it. The monsters—human or otherwise—live outside of our rules and thrive. We follow the rules and suffer.
Herdal leans into the cruelty of normal society framed by the apocalypse. The battles we would fight in the privacy of our homes become the entertainment of the evening. The storylines in the play are about broken relationships, infidelity, and violence in the home. These petty concerns can seem like the end of the world in the moment. After surviving a nuclear disaster, these moments become relics of a recent and forgotten past.
Cadaver is a bleak film. You can imagine from the set up where the stories go. Children are not supposed to see this show, though the owner makes an exception for Alice. Soon enough, the immersive production in the luxury hotel asks the audience to follow the actors throughout the building and Alice gets separated from her parents.
There are many layers being played with in the concept of the story. First, there’s the still new and emerging world of immersive theatre. These productions, most famously the Macbeth-inspired Sleep No More, asks the audience to follow the story at their own pace. They work to separate parties from each other to put you off guard and connect you on a deeper psychological element to the production. The actors can make contact with you, which has always been a stumbling block for my enjoyment of these shows. I’ve done a few smaller scale ones and the results are always quite unnerving to me.
Second, the Cadaver reference, aside from the dead bodies of the apocalypse, refers to anatomical theatre going back to the 1500s. This was a mix of medical training and morbid entertainment where academics and lay people alike could watch autopsies happen in beautifully constructed medical facilities. As metaphor, you could watch a life get pulled apart to learn more about the human experience.
Third, the immersive show itself is pulling from a classic horror form in theatre. The Grand Guignol theatre in Paris used to perform disturbing and violent short plays. Much like our modern understanding of cinematic horror, the scenes would swap between horror and comedy to keep the audience off guard and unable to predict what would happen next. A graphic play about brain surgery and reanimating the dead could lead to a raucous scene of sexual exploration. The form explored the innate brutality of humanity, a natural extension of the far more violent elements of even ancient Greek theatre.
Cadaver is a unique cinematic horror experience. It is an innately theatrical piece, recontextualizing several historical movements that laid the groundwork for modern horror films into the form of the horror film. So much of what we love about horror is derived from theatre. These terrifying plays predate even literary horror, though they are labeled tragedies. They are studied for their grand themes and cultural impact, not the fact that a protagonist removes his own eyes or murders her own family as the climax of the story. Cadaver experiments with the nature of horror itself through the lens of theatre.
Cadaver is streaming on Netflix.
