I’m going to oversell He Never Died. I’ll just put that right out there.
While I had a wonderful SXSW 2015 experience, including some giant mainstream hits like Furious 7 and The Road Warrior, as well as a powerful and devastating emotional experience with Krisha… I still found myself hunting that that “it” movie of the festival. The movie that I absolutely fall in love with and want to show all my friends. That movie that I’ll want to own and watch repeatedly. And for me that ended up being the very last movie I was able to see at the festival (which, let me tell you, is the best way to go out).
He Never Died had me smiling, laughing, gasping, and fully hooked from the outset. Using an incredible sonic soundscape that represents the chaos going on inside Jack’s (Henry Rollins’) mind, we get to hear and feel this man’s crooked mental state and begin to understand him before he’s done or said almost anything. And in the end Jack really doesn’t say much. But the dialogue he does have (detached, uncaring, cynical, and hysterical) is delivered flawlessly by Rollins, who has the role of his life on his hands here with Jack. I don’t think it spoils much of anything to note that Jack… has a problem with dying. Let’s just say he’s been around for a while, and when we’re introduced to him he’s living a quiet life. He’s stored up some money, rents a crappy apartment, eats at the same diner everyday, and plays bingo. There’s also a little matter of buying some mysterious and important packages from a medical intern which he keeps in his refrigerator. Jack always seems to be keeping something at bay, and we get the sense that the distance he places between himself and the rest of humanity is due to some sort of inherent goodness. There’s something dark in him that we hear trying to get out, but as an audience, we aren’t too sure what the source of his darkness is.
Believe me, I’m not going to spoil any of the twists and turns offered in He Never Dies other than to say this is a genre film which will have you guessing at exactly what genre it is. By 2015, genre filmgoers have been drowned in origin, mythology, and legend. Eternal life normally comes about due to vampirism, some kind of werewolf deal, maybe some type of zombie situation… Well, He Never Died manages to feel fresh and smart even here in 2015 with all those kinds of stories having entire sub-genres themselves. It doesn’t really fit into much of any category I can think of except possibly “Canadian”, which it very much is. And a large part of the fun comes from trying to guess where things are heading. Each each time you try to put the film into a classification it goes somewhere different.
There are action beats, horror elements, comedic sequences, and yes, even some supernatural goings on. But He Never Died, written and directed by relative newcomer Jason Krawczyk, doesn’t rest on any genre laurels, and remains a methodically paced tale, as steady and peculiar as our mysterious protagonist. Clever writing, a refusal to dump a bunch of exposition on the audience to clue them in, nuanced characters, and a constantly surprising brand of humor kept me from ever drifting. I was with Jack from the earliest moments and found myself shocked and satisfied upon the conclusion of this chapter of his life.
A little bit like The Highlander, one of the most familiar elements of He Never Died is the exploration of what it might be like to be really, really old. And where some folks fell in love with the arthouse hipness of last year’s Only Lovers Left Alive for this very reason, for my money I’ll take the Henry Rollins version of eternity any day over that film.
Rollins plays Jack a bit like an autistic person, with troubled social interactions, suffering no guff from anyone at all (including the people he’s built some small human connections with). And when a young woman enters his life and some complications arise from his arrangement with the medical intern which in some way threatens the fragile peace he’s established for himself, the outside world begins cracking Jack’s shell and forcing itself inside. Two bit criminals prove to be no match for Jack in every physical confrontation that ensues. But perhaps what sells the violence and action beats so hard is the character work that presides over it all. Who Jack is, why he is different, and why he can barely be bothered to give a damn about anything going on in his own story, is a constant source of entertainment. Watching Rollins snatch a gun out of an attacker’s hand with a total lack of interest on his face somehow makes him even more badass than the toughest action hero in the world doing that very same thing and then striking a pose afterward as the camera pushes in for a close up. Imagine if the Coen brothers wrote and directed a Highlander movie and you are getting about as clear of a picture as I can conjure.
Exploring mental illness, addiction, and effectively portraying the fragility of human emotional connection (not to mention the fragility of humans drawing breath to maintain life), He Never Died does what most great genre cinema does by giving us some subtle reflections to ruminate on even as it mostly concerns itself with entertaining us from start to finish. And without spoiling Jack’s story I can’t go too much deeper into detail on that front.
Rollins so completely embodies Jack that I can’t possibly imagine the film without him. The role weds Rollins’ own tough guy, punk rock image perfectly with the written character, at once completely becoming Jack and yet somehow never losing the foreknowledge we have of Rollins’ own very public anger and frustration at the ways of the world. I’m not certain if Krawczyk wrote with Rollins in mind or not, but regardless, Rollins reminds the world that he’s a multi-disciplined artist here, and Krawczyk leaves an incredible calling card as well. Restrained, confident, quietly hilarious and mysterious, Krawczyk crafts a visually and aurally compelling film and maintains a tough tone throughout.
He Never Died felt like it was playing directly to me. The humor landed every time, the surprising directions and twists that the story takes hit me close to home (or at least felt enormously personally satisfying), and have ultimately had me thinking about the movie and wanting to see it again ever since. It landed so completely for me that I’m certain I’ll oversell it for many of you. I haven’t heard anyone else coming out of SXSW this year finding this film to be the breakout hit for them. The buzz was positive, but He Never Died ended up being my personal favorite film of the festival and maybe not too many others’. I hope it finds an audience in North America and slowly cements itself as a cult genre classic, because it has every right to be.
And I’m Out.