Your 8-year old daughter is kidnapped, raped and murdered. Her body is left out in the open, exposed to the elements to be found by whoever happens upon her. As a parent, what do you do? How do you cope? What form of justice seems fair in a world where something so terrible can occur? If these questions sound shocking and extreme, its because 7 DAYS deals with shocking and extreme subject matter.
Daniel Grou tackles these questions in 7 DAYS, or Les 7 jours du talion, his feature film directorial debut, adapted from and written by novelist Patrick Senécal. This French-Canadian production is a disturbing and poetically accomplished film of revenge and regret. 7 DAYS is at times terribly difficult to watch, but at other times is mesmerizing with its quiet, contemplative approach. The audience is taken inside the mind of a father who has tragically lost his 8-year old daughter in the most horrible way imaginable.
Dr. Bruno Hamel, played by Claude Legault, struggles with the loss of his daughter Jasmine, but cannot bring himself to mourn in the traditional, inactive way of his wife Sylvie, played by Fanny Mallette. Instead, Bruno allows his anger and his need for vengeance to take over, justifying it as his debt to his daughter. Once Bruno learns that authorities have captured the offender with rock solid DNA evidence, Bruno concocts an unexpected but well-laid plan to kidnap his daughter’s murderer and serve his own justice.
As I mentioned already, 7 DAYS is both a beautiful film and also a disturbing piece of psychological cinema. From the very beginning, Grou sets the audience up with sterile but meticulously arranged visual storytelling. The shots are framed with surgical precision to accentuate a sense of empty space. Characters are often placed far off the one edge on the image or are made distant by their relationship to the foreground or sandwiched claustrophobically within spaces of falsely created barriers to the outside world.
The cinematography from Bernard Couture embraces the washed out and sullen palette of grays and whites, not just because the story takes place in winter but as a way to convey a sense of emotional winter for the Hamels. While there is a score composed by Nicholas Maranda, the audience will be hard pressed to notice any music on this effectively silent film. This lack of noticeable music embeds the sense of reality within the viewer’s mind. The experience feels less like an escape into a world of fantasy and more like a frightening revelation of how our real world actually is at times.
As Bruno proceeds with his plan for revenge on his daughter’s killer, the film becomes increasingly uncomfortable. Viewers, whom are squeamish at the sight of violence against another, torture or blood, beware. However, 7 DAYS is not equitable to films such as SAW or HOSTEL. The blood and gore are kept at a minimum, but there are graphic depictions of torture and pain, as well as male genitalia. 7 DAYS focuses more on the psychological aspect of torture and revenge, not just from the killer but also through the eyes of Bruno.
With seven days between when Bruno kidnapped his daughter’s killer and the date of Jasmine’s birthday, Bruno exacts one act of torture after another. What begins as cold and methodically delivered acts of torture from Bruno, slowly erodes into more frantic acts of desperation as Bruno’s conscience begins to regain control over his need for vengeance. Making his plan all the more difficult to carry to fruition is Detective Mercure, played by Rémy Girard, who works diligently to locate Bruno, but shares a similar sense of loss and feeling of helplessness at the hands of the justice system.
7 DAYS is an extremely powerful story about the inner workings of the human mind when subjected to extreme emotional trauma. The film is a perilous expedition deep into Bruno’s psyche as he battles within himself between his primal urges and his greater sense of what is right and wrong. For Bruno, a man whose life has been built upon the Hippocratic oath, righting a wrong requires an act of wrongdoing.
