Schlitter: Evil in the Woods had its UK première at FrightFest 2024, 26 Aug
Etymologically related to the word ‘slide’, a schlitte is a type of wooden sled once commonly used In the Vosges mountains of Eastern France to transport stacked logs down steep slopes. Gravity alone gets it moving, while the human operator, situated at the front with his feet dug deep into the ground, served as its only brake – a task requiring considerable strength, and with the potential to cause crippling injuries. At the beginning of Pierre Mouchet’s feature debut Schlitter: Evil in the Woods, when eight-year-old Lucas (Antime Calbrie Ekeloo) fails to keep his grip on a schlitte laden with timber, his father Louis (Bernard Eylenbosch) pulls him away just in time, but then slaps him hard for letting the vehicle crash, while mother Mathilde (Marie-Paule Kumps) looks on without interceding on behalf of her son.
This leads to a complicated chain of events. When Lucas’ neighbour and best friend Mathias (Nelson Maerten), also eight, sees the bruise on Lucas’ face, he tells Lucas that he should stand up more to his bullying brute of a father. So when Louis, driving Lucas home in their SUV, demands a cigarette, Lucas, knowing that Mathilde has told her husband not to smoke, defiantly refuses to hand one over, causing Louis to turn back in a rage to Lucas in the back seat, taking his eyes off the mountain road ahead, and so unwittingly to collide head on with Mathias who is out riding his bicycle. Lucas, already traumatised by what he has just witnessed, becomes even more so as he sees his father cover up their involvement in little Mathias’ death.
Two decades later, Lucas (Louka Meliava) has long since left home for Paris, where he attempts to atone for the past with his work as a Special Education Needs teacher – but he still suffers nightmares of his father coming after him with an axe. Receiving news that both his parents have just been killed in a house fire, Lucas returns home for the first time in years to attend their funeral, with his pregnant girlfriend Julie (Léna Laprès) and best friend Arnaud (Côme Levin) along to help him pick up the pieces. Yet as Mathias’ father Francis (Gilles David), now a wheelchair-bound widower, invites the three over to pick up a box of Louis and Mathilde’s personal effects, it quickly becomes clear that this strong, single-minded ex-lumberjack, handy with tools and traps, has long had a Saw-like vengeance in mind, and that it is a slippery slope from past sins to present suffering.
Co-writing with Nicolas Robin, Mouchet has crafted a twisty, nasty revenge thriller where collateral damage is built equally into the crime and the punishment, and where patriarchal preoccupations take priority over everything else. For here we have three models of fatherhood: one overbearing and abusive, one damaged and destructive, and one reluctant but self-sacrificing. Meanwhile, Mouchet also takes time to show the predicament of the mothers, caught helpless and horrified in daddy’s dark shadow. The results are a cruel game of cat and mouse, with some very mean-spirited mechanisms of death – but also a fucked-up family film, showing the unstoppable sliding descent of trauma from one generation to the next.
strap: Pierre Mouchet’s messy revenge slasher tracks the slippery slope from past crime to present consequence
© Anton Bitel
