Director – Ryuhei Kitamura, Screenplay – Christopher Jolley, Story – Christopher Jolley & Ryuhei Kitamura, Producers – Mark Andrews, Jessica Bennett, Robert Dean, Stephanie Denton, Bill Kelman, Ryuhei Kitamura, Todd Lundbohm & Andre Relis, Photography – Matthias Schubert, Music – Aldo Shllaku, Special Effects Supervisor – Erik Kerker, Makeup Effects – Pepper Gallegos, Production Design – . Production Company – VMI Worldwide/828 Media Capital.
Cast
Gigi Zumbado (Grace), Stephen Dorff (Cody), Emile Hirsch (Alex), Vernon Wells (The Doctor), Tyler Sanders (Danny), Tanner Zagarino (Shane), Erika Ervin (Jodi), Sabina Mach (Carly), Heath Hensley (Mr Fuller)
Plot
Grace goes to a pawnshop to plead with the owner Mr Fuller for an extension on the money she owes. She is in the back room as an armed robbery of the shop is conducted by brothers Alex and Danny and the former soldier Cody. This goes wrong and Danny is wounded, in the course of which the psychopathic Alex shoots Fuller and the other employees. Grace is discovered and forced to drive them in her car to make a getaway. However, her car breaks down outside of town. They head to a nearby farmhouse and beg shelter in one of the adjoining houses from the teenage Danny. However, when Danny’s grandfather returns, they discover that he abducts people to conduct illicit organ transplants.
Japanese director Ryuhei Kitamura emerged in the early 2000s with the gore-drenched Yakuza zombie film Versus (2000). He subsequently went onto a number of other genre works in Japan including the horror film Alive (2002), Aragami (2003) about an immortal samurai, the horror film Sky High (2003), Godzilla: Final Wars (2004), the animated science-fiction film Baton (2009) and a live-action adaptation of the manga Lupin III (2014). He has also produced the Japanese films Battlefield Baseball (2003) and Hellgate (2011).
Ryuhei Kitamura’s output throughout the 2010s has been almost entirely in the English language, beginning with the standout Clive Barker adaptation The Midnight Meat Train (2008), his best film to date. Others he made during this time include No One Lives (2012), Downrange (2017), the Mashit episode of the horror anthology Nightmare Cinema (2018), the non-genre action film The Doorman (2020) and The Price We Pay, before a return to Japan with the afterlife film The Three Sisters of Tenmasou Inn (2022). In these, Kitamura is shooting on medium budgets and opts to tell crime stories with a tough unsentimental flavour that sit with one foot in the horror genre.
The Price We Pay is another of these works. It starts out as Gigi Zumbado goes in to plead for an extension on her debts (and it is implied is required to do something unsavoury with the obese pawn shop owner), By accident, she ends up caught in the midst of a robbery gone wrong and is forced to drive the group as they make a getaway. Here she becomes caught between Stephen Dorff as the sensible, hard-headed ex-soldier and Emile Hirsch as the unhinged psychopath of the group and even ends up aiding Dorff when it comes to creating their cover story.
Criminals on the run (l to r) Emile Hirsch and Stephen Dorff6’8” trans model Erika Ervin aka Amazon Eve as Jodi
About the halfway point, The Price We Pay does a From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)-styled bait-and-switch on us. In almost identical ways, what starts as a getaway/hostage thriller then does an about-face and throws the characters into a horror scenario. It joins a bunch of other films in recent years about housebreakers or criminals on the run who unwittingly enter into something even worse as with the likes of The Collector (2009), Don’t Breathe (2016), Bad Samaritan (2018), Monster Party (2018), Villains (2019), The Owners (2020), Hounded (2022) and Little Bone Lodge (2023).
It is at this point that Vernon Wells is introduced as a Mad Surgeon who is engaged in an Organ Harvesting scheme. The exact nature of Wells’s scheme is not entirely clear – something to do with his daughter who was disfigured by bad men and how he is trying to repair her looks a la most mad surgeons since Pierre Brasseur in the seminal Eyes Without a Face (1959). We do meet the daughter who is like a gender-flipped version of Leatherface, played by 6’8” trans model Erika Ervin aka Amazon Eve.
Ryuhei Kitamura delivers a solid film with The Price We Pay. It is one where he is constantly placing the characters in uncomfortable situations and twisting the scenario on them. I am not so keen on Emile Hirsch who seems to want to be the low-rent Jack Black these days, but Stephen Dorff gives a fine hard-headed performance. Vernon Wells, a genre veteran, has some worthwhile presence as the mad surgeon of the show. The scenes with him conducting surgery have some undeniably nasty and grisly impact.
