Furious, a new film from Netflix, is much more than a film about street violence, although many of its most shocking scenes take place between fights and confrontations. However, the Polish film is more interested in exploring new ideas under what appears to be a dark crime drama. A resource that shows that behind the shootings, the bare-knuckle fights and its dark tone, there are complex premises. What is betrayal when you really face your own nature? Furious the perception of morality is constantly questioned and does so through a curious resource. The relationship between two brothers and the way in which this bond must feed a dense and increasingly complex plot.
In fact, director Cyprian T. Olencki is very aware of these little gray spaces that block the screenplay, which he also writes. The film insists on the perception that the dilemma facing its characters is beyond them and puts them to the test. But it’s not just an overwhelming tension that unites and separates them.
Also, the focus is on the setting that makes confrontation inevitable. When David (Mateusz Banasiuk) has to accept a police contract that will bring you back to the worst times of his past, he must also face his own darkness. Doctor and with a long history of violence, the character is a balance between two worlds.
On the one hand, the perception of fear and moral duty: David accepts police treatment to save his brother. At the same time, that part of him – raw, brutal and uncontrollable – which is always part of his nature. The director plays with the idea that even if David accepts police treatment because he has no other choice, it’s actually a trip to something wilder.
Furious he is aware of his film condition amidst two versions of the moral and the emotional. And he plays with both conceptions, in the middle of a change undermined by ultra-violence which surprises with its rhythm and its dark tone. Who are we when the past reminds us of our worst times? It seems to challenge the argument in its best and most difficult sections.
The street as a setting for Furioza
At the other extreme, Furious it is also a police argument in its own right. The one who also develops a conception of the street as a scene of excess, horrors and a rare fraternity. Furious it’s a combination of narrative threads that come together at its most unsettling and powerful moments. The camera follows David through increasingly shocking and confusing spaces.
Little by little, the rhythm of the film becomes more and more frantic and its scenes harder.
Little by little, the rhythm of the film becomes more and more frantic and its scenes harder. Furious does not hide that its plot depends more or less on the shocking nature of its fight scenes. hand to hand combat which transform the tension into a series of terrifying images filmed with particular care. Faces distorted by the blows, the night fire rising to show the devastating passage of the gangs. Claustrophobic spaces that show the innards of crime. Gradually, Furious becomes a detailed look at what lies beneath cities. The closed and formidable spaces that hide contemporary evil. Real violence and, ultimately, the worst of human nature.
For the film, infiltrating organized crime involves dehumanizing yourself and becoming a brutal creature. Also have the insistent awareness that you are being watched by those around you. David, in all its quality as a roadmap to complex places in the modern city transformed into an almost apocalyptic setting, he is a painful observer. Also the one he finds in the old places he remembers and which in a certain way reflect him, a twist to his convictions.
The street fight and the fear of the future
The character of David evolves little by little in the middle of an increasingly delicate film. Is he an infiltrator due to police treatment? To the fact that he must save his brother from the violence he already knows? Maybe it’s a part of him that ended up waking up in the middle of an ultra-violent context? In Furious nothing is obvious. Or at least, not what one would expect from a film that weighs its weight in its brutal mise-en-scène.
Furious surprises by defying expectations. With his conviction that violence is a primitive human evil, but also and inevitable, the film builds its own layer of reality. It’s this version of street horror sublimated into something more complex that makes it powerful. And perhaps, a rarity amid the cinematic violence so common today.
