FILM REVIEW: Ten (2014)

Ten women traveling on business find themselves in a vacant, supposedly haunted mansion on Spektor Island in the early 1970s, and no one is who they seem they are. Trapped in an empty house with a full wine cellar, the last ferry has gone for the night and a storm is rolling in. After a few bottles of wine, the ten women are slowly picked off one by one by a masked, meat cleaver-wielding figure wearing a nurse’s uniform.

A renegade, a religious fanatic, a real estate agent, a medium, an actress, a model, an historian, a doctor, a coed, and a folk singer filling out the cast in an all-female version of Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None (which itself was influenced by the children’s rhyme Ten Little Indians), Ten is more a feminist Cold War-era thriller than a horror film. All-female films shouldn’t be unusual, or at least no more unusual than an all male cast, such as, military, western, and action films, but they are. A recent Time Magazine article states that out of the 700 top grossing films from 2007-2014, only 30% of characters with a speaking or named role were female. And of the top 100 movies from 2014, only 16% had women in behind-the-scenes roles such as writers, producers, or directors. While not completely unheard of, with Brian De Palma’s Sisters, Dario Argento’s Suspiria, and Repulsion as standouts, horror films with a mostly female cast are still somewhat rare.

Propelling the narrative forward without men and taking place in a 1970s setting when women in the workplace only accounted for 44% of professional jobs, Ten would unfortunately fail a variant of the Bechdel test, (where a work of fiction requires at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man), due to the fact none of the characters are named. Adding to the mystique of the film rather than subtracting from it, it’s another experiment that proves relatively successful in a film that tries to subvert audience expectations.

In spite of an all-female cast and a female-driven narrative, Ten‘s feminist structure comes off as a gimmick, where dimly-lit scenes of semi-nude, blood-drenched women attempts to shock and titillate, relying on tropes found routinely in horror film instead of radical reinvention. Stagey, with grandiose, wooden dialogue and unconvincing acting, Ten has an art-house, cult appeal that is reminiscent of the technicolor horror films of Dario Argento, the gory, nude vampire films of Jean Rollin, or the obscure, no-budget, talky melodramas of Andy Milligan.

Ten‘s recurring pig theme throughout adds a bit of foreshadowing and symbolism that’s more apparent once its Cold War-era spy element is unveiled, and the symmetrical, day-glo scenes of women outfitted in garish pig masks are appropriately disturbing. The cinematography is colorful and stylish, and the film-makers try many dramatic camera angles and visual experiments to some degree of success, with a shot-for-shot homage to Hitchcock’s Psycho a standout scene. Sadly, technical missteps such as boom shadows, garish lighting, inconsistent sound, and a verbose script mar the film further, but ultimately gives Ten a loose, indie charm.