Bringing Out the Dead
Directed by Martin Scorsese
- drama
The story
Once called "Father Frank" for his efforts to rescue lives, Frank Pierce sees the ghosts of those he failed to save around every turn. He has tried everything he can to get fired, calling in sick, delaying taking calls where he might have to face one more victim he couldn't help, yet cannot quit the job on his own.
What it’s like
Grimy night-time New York in sickly sodium orange and sickly green, rain-slicked asphalt and the hot red wash of ambulance lights bleeding across windshields and hospital corridors. Scorsese's camera swings and shoves through the chaos in restless handheld moves, then snaps into stark, almost hallucinatory stillness when Frank's memory of the dead surfaces, with grainy, overexposed images and a heavy, ringing silence broken by Robbie Robertson's jittery, sax-streaked score and dissonant pulses of music. The vibe is frayed, sleepless and feverish, a bleak nocturnal dream that drifts into surreal, almost comic horror. Frank, a burnt-out paramedic, moves through a ceaseless parade of overdoses, cardiac arrests, and gruesome injuries, with blood, bodies and some brief but jarring violence, and the dread comes as much from the anxiety of dying as from physical gore. Its tone is caustic and morbid, with flashes of dark humour, and the pace is ragged, unsettling and punctuated by long, disorienting stretches. It suits a late-night, solitary viewing when you want something raw and unnerving, and it is for people who appreciate gritty, character-driven cinema about guilt, faith and self-destruction.
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