Ravenous: Writer Griffin & Director Bird Break the Mold

I always try and look back to pinpoint when exactly film became a staple in my life – years ago back in high school, Visions class (a film analysis course). As every cinephile will say, there’s a personal canon of films that make up our backbone. Each one is vastly different than the next. The movies we fight for. The movies we are not scared to conversationally crash and burn for. Writer Ted Griffin and director Antonia Bird supplied me with one of those films: Ravenous. A combination of breakthrough screenwriting and aggressively bold direction, Ravenous breaks the mold with highly unique characters, no holds barred acting and a storyline that, in my opinion, can never be matched. Oh, and don’t let that Rotten Tomatoes score of 40% get you down; some critics are scared of movies that pack an aggressive, well, bite.

Screenwriter Ted Griffin stated that Ravenous was the first film he wrote that really lived outside the wireframe of conventional screenwriting. I agree with this statement fully because it takes an unconventional topic, cannibalism, and flips it on its head by injecting black humor while still being able to avoid all of the trapdoors that can plague a script like this – the main trapdoor being the validity of the entire premise of trying to legitimize and stick up for cannibalism. A tough task to say the least. But it’s done with a sense of darkly written elegance that makes the viewer rewind what he or she just saw and heard. For example, our minds are not initially programmed to understand Colqhoun’s (Robert Carlyle) perspective when he chases Toffler (Jeremy Davies) down like a dog, but Griffin’s line of “that’s so annoying” enables us to see that Colqhoun is not only in this for the power, but for the sport of it as well. That turning point signals to us that this is a film of the darkest “humor” that we should probably watch by ourselves just in case we laugh out loud.  

Now on to another pivotal piece of this meaty puzzle (see what I did there?): Antonia Bird.  Being as Bird passed away only a few weeks ago, this piece is not just dedicated to her talent, but her bravery with taking on a project like this. What do I mean by “bravery?” Once a script like Ravenous is presented, it is tough to find a director who has the A.) “cohunes,” if you will, to tackle the project and B.) the parallel vision to bring the story to life on the screen. Having an antagonist slurp back some of the supporting characters’ insides makes for a directorial challenge, but Bird tackles it head on with a sense of boldness we sadly don’t see as much of today (Fincher and Aronofsky being the exceptions). But how, specifically, does she give this film the “scratch your head” feel? With each scene she has brought in a score that reflects the schizophrenic mayhem that’s happening on screen, while extracting a masterful performance from Robert Carlyle (who she has worked with multiple times before). But there’s one main chunk missing, ah yes, the eating!

There is a huge directorial trapdoor in a film like this – that being the gruesomeness taking over and letting it be the main substance of content that fills the screen. Bird beautifully avoids this sinkhole and strategically places gritty, cannibalistic scenes in just the right places (my favorite being Boyd’s daydream as he stares out of the window. Who wouldn’t want to see David Arquette get eaten, right?). By directorially choosing the hard right over the easy wrong with this, Bird gives much more validation and backbone to her storyline and character development, not only of themselves, but also between each other as an ensemble.

Think of Ravenous as a human body diagram. Yes, just like the ones we all learned from in high school. Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle, Jeffrey Jones and the rest of the cast are the limbs of the body. This, mixed with the brainpower of Ted Griffin and the heart of Antonia Bird, makes for a near perfect, well-oiled eating machine.