FILM REVIEW: ​Playground

FILM REVIEW: Playground

10/1/2018

SPOILER ALERT: I’M GIVING AWAY THE ENDING, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

I have found that with horror films in particular there are so many excellent ones that people miss out on because they can’t be bothered with subtitled offerings due in some cases to the belief that there will be Hollywood remakes in English at some point. Although that’s a known quantity it’s not necessarily smart thinking because certain films are so much better in the original version. I think Playground stands very little chance of a remake as I doubt Hollywood would touch it, and I’m pretty sure that even the most twisted British film studios would also give this one a very wide berth if they want to remain in business as it states in the blurb that it is based on a terrifying true story, and although the film is Polish it is quite possible that they are referring to the notorious British murder case in 1993 in which Robert Thompson and Jon Venables brutally tortured and murdered two year old Jamie Bulger.

Playground has a rather mundane beginning, nicely showcasing the young stars of the film as they prepare to start the day in routine fashion and fairly normal surroundings. There’s a palpable sense of something seriously wrong here though with the three main characters being fleshed out in a believable fashion with one being a shy and plain little girl with a crush on her classmate, the object of her desire living with (and abusing) his disabled dad and the third one being his friend who is a bit of a rebel with a cruel streak who likes to film the stuff he does. Nothing outstandingly horrific happens for the first third of the film but there’s enough character development to suggest that when it kicks off it could be somewhat vicious.

The ‘End of Term graduation ceremonies’ are simple and straightforward, children winning prizes, mostly sitting around bored waiting for the teaching staff to finish talking. The end of term is perhaps the last chance the young girl has as she has fallen in love but wants to know if the boy feels the same way, so she arranges to meet him at some ruins. What happens next is masterful acting and unfortunately true to life. Without going into too much detail the object of her affection doesn’t feel the same way. He has his friend with him who films their encounter on a mobile phone. It’s nasty but mostly verbal bullying and the girl leaves more psychologically upset than physically harmed.

This is where things get seriously disturbing. When the girl leaves, the boys head off elsewhere, walking through the town where for some reason everyone is standing still and looking at them. They head off to a shopping mall, where they muck about for a bit, just loitering, but then they see a young boy sitting in a coin-op ride-on machine outside a shop. As with the Bulger case they abduct him, take him by railroad tracks and with gut-wrenching realism they kill him. It’s not filmed in a sensationalist manner, it’s all rather ‘matter of fact’, which adds to the horror as it’s all so routinely presented as to appear somehow normal, if something that evil ever could be.

Mercifully the murder of the child is shown at a reasonable distance so although you can clearly tell what is happening you don’t have the gore going on, so it’s not the ‘torture porn’ sort of scenario a lot of films use. The special effects team on this film are top notch, if I had just seen this particular footage and nothing else it would look as if someone caught a real murder on camera. It doesn’t go on for long, but it’s very disturbing stuff, which leads me to wonder why the film was made.

I know there’s an enormous market for gruesome stuff, I’m a fan of it, but sometimes there are Film Gutter offerings such as ‘Let the Right One In’, ‘The Human Centipede’ and ‘A Serbian Film’ to name a few, which can satisfy the darker desires while still remaining obvious entertainment. So I’m somewhat ripped in two by this because although well shot and definitely well-acted I cannot see any way in which Playground is entertainment. If anything I’d say it has more of a documentary feel to it.

I normally watch things three times, but with this film once is enough, so if watching a little boy being beaten to death is your sort of thing then you know what to do.