EVERLY

US, 2014, 92 minutes, Colour.
Salma Hayek, Laura Cepeda, Togo Igawa, Hiroyuki Watanabe, Masashi Fujimoto.
Directed by Joe Lynch.

This is a film which is difficult to recommend to any audience except those dyed-in-the-wool fans of sadistic torture films. With such films as The Hostel series, commentators began to use the phrase “Torture Porn”. Everly certainly fits into this category. It is particularly brutal, visually ugly, cruel with its variety of torture and murders.

It is surprising that Salma Hayek was a producer of this film as well as the star.

It is basically an abduction story. Everly has been living with her mother, has a young daughter, but has been abducted by the yakuza-style criminal group, principally Japanese. She has been a prisoner for five years, wanting to see her daughter, to be reunited with her mother – even though she has access with a mobile phone. She is kept in a building, hotel like, with a variety of corridors, rooms for many of the women who have been similarly abducted.

At the opening of the film, Everly reacts and there are some deaths of businessman who have come to her room. One of these businessmen, a young man, rather more sympathetic, has been wounded and, throughout the film, sits on a sofa talking with Everly and observing what goes on, finally helping her.

The various girls in the establishment are given an opportunity to react, are threatened by the men, hunted to their rooms, some of them tortured and killed. Some try to help Everly.

Two key Japanese characters in the film, one called in the credits,The Sadist, living up to his name in some very gruesome sequences. The other is the manager of the whole enterprise, able to watch heavily by cameras, coming to confront her – but her overcoming him with more than a vengeance.

For emotional effect, her mother and her daughter also come to the place secretly, the mother trying to save her daughter but also being killed. at the end. Everly is, of course, triumphant and the battered and tortured woman overcomes her male slave masters.

Not exactly the kind of film, or the film, to recommend.