Replace (2017) poster

Replace (2017)

Rating:


Germany/Canada. 2017.

Crew

Director – Norbert Keil, Screenplay – Nobert Keil & Richard Stanley, Producer – Felix Von Poser, Photography – Tim Kuhn, Music – Tom Batoy & Franco Tortora, Visual Effects – Felix Comploi BFX (Supervisor – Felix Comploi), Prosthetic Makeup Designed by Katharie Grethlein & Philipp Rathgeber, Production Design – Fryderyk Swierczynski. Production Company – Sparkling Pictures/Eberhard Müller Filmproduktion/Gerhard LidiFilm/Ultra 8 Pictures.

Cast

Rebecca Forsythe (Kira Mabon), Lucie Aron (Sophie Demeraux), Barbara Crampton (Dr Rafaela Crober), Sean Knopp (Jonas Swierczynski), Adnan Maral (Dr Czerny), Laura Cuenca Serrano (Waitress)


Plot

Kira Mabon finds herself outside her apartment but has no memory of how she got there. Her neighbour Sophie Demeraux comes to her help. Kira then finds that she has patches of dry skin on her fingers. These rapidly spread to cover her arm and chest. She goes to a doctor who is baffled as to the cause. Sophie finds an appointment that Kira has with the specialist Dr Rafaela Crober who is studying Kira’s skin condition and promises a possible cure. Kira then finds that when she places skin from another person over her dead skin, it is absorbed and her skin looks like new again. She breaks into a morgue but finds that this does not work with skin taken from a cadaver. That leaves her with the only option of killing another person and taking their skin to rejuvenate her own. However, it is not long before her skin starts to revert and she is forced to kill again.


Replace was the first major release and English-language film of German director Norbert Keil who had previously made the little-seen, non-genre comedy Von Wegen! (2005). The interesting name on the credits is that of co-writer Richard Stanley, no less than the cult director-writer of Hardware (1990) and Colour Out of Space (2019).

Replace falls into the label of what some people refer to as Body Horror. This is not a label I much use on this site as definitions of what Body Horror is are so broad as to cover everything from the cinema of David Cronenberg to fairly much anything with gooey meltdowns or lots of splatter and bodies hacked up or. At least in the sense that term should be used – to refer to people undergoing horrible physical transformations – then Replace is definitely a work of Body Horror.

You could make comparisons to other Body Horror films like The Fly (1986) or Contracted (2013). I was reminded in particular of Thanatomorphose (2012) with Kayden Rose in her apartment slowly undergoing a complete physical decay. Or of David Cronenberg’s Rabid (1977) with Marilyn Chambers infected with a parasitic organ that must drink the blood of other people.

Rebecca Forsythe contemplates the dead skin on her hand in Replace (2017)
Rebecca Forsythe contemplates the dead skin on her hand

Replace starts with calm effect as Rebecca Forsythe appears amnesiac and then finds areas of her skin starting to turn white and peel off. Soon this is spreading all the way up her arm and torso. These scenes have an initial calm and it becomes a jolt when things slide over to where we see Rebecca Forsythe first breaking into a mortuary and trying to attach a slice of skin from a cadaver to herself and finding it doesn’t work and then attacking a waitress at a restaurant and skinning her to rejuvenate her skin. It is not long before it gets to the point where Rebecca has a girl imprisoned nude in the bath. The casual slide over into corpse defilement and murder and abduction comes as quite a jolt.

Replace becomes undeniably effective in the creepy horrific effect that Nobert Keil generates. Towards the end, Rebecca Forsythe undergoes a Conceptual Breakthrough to realise that her condition is the result of a series of experiments. These scenes come with some jolt revelations that work undeniably effectively, not to mention has genre veteran Barbara Crampton sinking her teeth into a coldly ruthless role as the scientist.


Trailer here


Director:
Actors: , , , , ,
Category:
Themes: , , , , ,