Directed by William Friedkin. Written by Walon Green
William Friedkin’s Sorcerer is a snarling beast of a movie, offering a hellacious trip through the Latin American jungle in the company of four desperate men who agree to transport an explosive cargo through the wilderness.
A remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, Sorcerer retains the sweat-inducing central storyline and amplifies its terror into near-delirium as the damned truck drivers try to navigate a throbbing jungle, rickety bridges, and crumbling mountain roads. Life has never been felt so out of control at 10 miles an hour.
It’s live wire filmmaking. Friedkin puts you within an inch of splintering logs as they fracture under the weight of a rustbucket of a truck, he pummels you with the downpour of a biblical tempest, and bowls you over with the howling wind and the roar of the truck’s engine, drowning out the screams of those cursed to be there.
You sweat as they do, feeling the cloying heat wrap itself around your neck. You feel the threadbare seat digging into your back. Your knuckles pop on the steering wheel, the dirty smell of gasoline invades your nostrils, and your fight or flight response has your ears ringing – all from the comfort of home. It’s a master class of evocative filmmaking.
Before he terrorizes you, Friedkin does spend 30 minutes outlining our protagonists, all men who due to their actions must flee their homes to hide out in the wilderness. A white-collar criminal, a stick-up crew member, a freedom fighter (or terrorist, depending on your politics), and a gun-for-hire. Friedkin feels we must know them a little, perhaps convinced we must watch these killers and thieves be people before they’re made existential prisoners, but frankly, these opening 30 minutes feel twice as long as the following 90.
Ramping up the way it does, Sorcerer conjures something akin to hallucinogenic fright in its characters, and the movie almost tilts over in its zeal. It’s hard to fault Friedkin, though, as the crescendo he builds to seems impossible to climb back down from with any sort of level-headed sensibility.
The protagonists all have blood on their hands in some way, and their actions in former lives make for the overture in a movie that hints at a predatory cosmic evil lurking here in this anonymous foreign place. Friedkin summons this with ancient indigenous imagery and then infuses the rustling of leaves and swell of water with the sense it’s driven by the will of dark forces. These men are hunted by the consequences of their actions, but the way Friedkin dials up the existential dread to reduce our protagonists to mere shadows, you wonder if you need to know them at all.
The cast, led by Roy Scheider, do manage to reduce themselves to rubble before your eyes, but the most potent impression comes from the movie’s texture, none of it pleasant. The racket and blistering heat of an oil rig, the squalor of the small town they live in, the stench of the flophouse our characters curl up in. Sorcerer could’ve been a movie without dialogue and it would’ve lost none of its potency, presenting an overwhelming sense of mortality just by its mise en scène and how its characters experience it.
Werner Herzog once described the jungle as something God created in anger, and Friedkin has been cribbing his notes. Then he made it real for you to experience too, creating a movie you’d watch through your fingers if you weren’t so busy clenching them into fists.
Mikkel Frederiksen 