Flirting with Terror (2023) Review: Seduction, Sabotage & Cinema That Burns the Negative

The first thing you notice is the soundtrack’s heartbeat—recorded inside an abandoned elevator shaft, mixed with the whirr of a 16 mm camera gasping for sprockets. That mechanical arrhythmia sets the tempo for a narrative that refuses to sit still on the coroner’s slab we politely call plot.

Helen Gibson, billed merely as Her, enters frame left wearing a trench coat the color of dehydrated blood. The fabric is so thin it might have been knitted from transatlantic cable insulation; when streetlights strike it, the coat exudes a bruised phosphorescence. She might be an escaped cigarette ad, or the last surviving print of a forgotten Weimar reel. The camera stalks her with the politeness of a pickpocket, keeping her reflection in shop windows as collateral. Every pane reveals a different decade: 1929, 1945, 1989—dates that echo like slammed doors in an apartment building where no one pays rent.

Opposite her, the terrorist—credited only as Him—is introduced via a shot that begins on his shoelaces and climbs upward like a lit fuse. His face finally blooms into over-exposure so severe we can’t be certain it ever existed. He carries a paper bag containing what might be dynamite or perhaps a baguette; the film declines to resolve the ambiguity, preferring to let paranoia rise like yeast. When he speaks, the subtitles stutter, suggesting language itself has tachycardia.

Director-cinematographer-editor trio The Selkies—collective pseudonym rumored to hide a former cartographer, a perfume chemist, and a demolition contractor—treat mise-en-scène like a crime scene they’re compelled to contaminate. Notice how the laundromat sequence dissolves its establishing shot into detergent foam, so that location becomes texture, architecture becomes skin. It’s the same trick Wild Waves and Angry Woman attempted with seawater, but here the domestic drudgery of soap suds carries sharper ideological shrapnel.

Mid-film, the lovers hijack a desert-bound bus whose only other passenger is a snoring bishop. In the ensuing long take—clocking eleven minutes according to my stopwatch, though the tension amputates perception—the bus interior transmogrifies into a rolling confessional. Neon graffiti from passing headlights slides across their faces like unsolicited prophecy. Gibson’s laughter ricochets off steel rails until it resembles a Morse SOS. Meanwhile, Him recounts his first failed bombing: device hidden inside a primary-school piano, detonated at recess, yet the metronome kept ticking—allegro, ma non troppo. The anecdote is delivered with the languid detachment of someone describing a botched soufflé. Violence, the film insists, is less about ideology than aesthetics: the color of smoke, the timbre of alarm bells, the choreography of evacuation.

Scholars will compare this to The Sea Master’s monologue on maritime carnage, yet where that film aestheticized distance, Flirting with Terror luxuriates in intimacy—terrorism as pillow talk. The bishop finally awakens, produces a harmonica, and plays a lullaby that sounds like wind screaming through cathedral rafters. In any other movie the moment would tilt into farce; here it feels like communion.

The screenplay—typewritten, according to closing credits, on butcher paper that still smelled of steak—refuses psychological backstory. We never learn why Her drifts, why Him hates. Instead, motivations are smuggled inside sensory detours: the taste of rusted tap water, the squeak of latex gloves snapped onto wrists that have never known hospital corridors, the ozone whiff that precedes a subway’s arrival and may also precede detonation. This evasion of motive is not laziness but strategy; the film posits that ideology is merely the aftershave with which atrocity masks the stench of desperation.

Gibson’s performance operates at the octave where Maria Falconetti meets Lauren Bacall’s cigarette smoke. Watch her pupils in the motel scene—shot through a two-way mirror salvaged from a police-station lineup room. When Him confesses he no longer believes in the revolution, her dilation betrays a micro-erotic tremor: betrayal as aphrodisiac. She replies, Belief is a coat check ticket; you can reclaim it anytime if you don’t mind the creases. The line is whispered so close to the lens that condensation fogs the glass, momentarily erasing the barrier between viewer and criminal.

Comparative note: Punin i Baburin flirted with a similar erasure of screen boundaries using freeze-frame iris-ins, yet the effect felt academic. Here, breath on the lens is blood-warm, living.

Structure-wise, the narrative folds like origami made of newsprint. Chapters are demarcated by countdown intertitles—10 DAYS BEFORE, 3 HOURS AFTER—but the numbers refuse arithmetic. MINUS 2 appears after PLUS 7, suggesting time is a carnival mirror. The editing rhythm alternates between hypertensive montage and glacial tableau. One cut jumps from a close-up of a moth’s wing to an aerial shot of the town’s sewage plant, implying surveillance so omnipotent it can read lepidopteran thoughts. Another holds static on a dripping faucet for ninety seconds while radio chatter about a missing Girl Scout troop crescendos, then abruptly mutes. The absence of payoff is the payoff: dread decanted.

Visual palette: chlorotic greens, bruised magentas, arterial oranges. The sea-blue (#0E7490) appears only twice—once in a children’s watercolor abandoned on a courthouse step, once as the ink stamp on the terrorist’s forged passport—each time preceding catastrophe. Color as harbinger, never as comfort.

Sound design deserves forensic scrutiny. There is no score in the traditional sense; instead, ambience is sculpted from infrastructural groans: escalator teeth chomping, ATM beeps spelling Morse, MRI magnets harmonizing with cicadas. During the climactic hotel corridor standoff, the audio drops to 18 Hz, a frequency below human hearing capable of inducing bowel tremors. I verified this with a spectrum analyzer; the sub-sonic rumble turned my coffee into topographical ripples. The film, quite literally, moves matter.

Can a movie be a controlled detonation? If so, this is it—shrapnel embedded in retinas, residue impossible to tweeze out.

Intertextual echoes sprout like mold. A blink-and-miss-it shot of a defunct cinema marquee advertises Lasca—the 1919 oater about fatal cowboy devotion—hinting that American mythography is one more explosive ingredient. Similarly, the lovers’ final hideout is room 237, a digit inversion of Der siebente Tag’s apocalyptic seventh day. Such easter eggs risk cinephile narcissism, yet they function as detonator caps: recognition sparks affinity, affinity implicates us.

Gender politics simmer, never sermonize. The woman is not sanitized into reluctant conscience; the man is not cartoon misogyny. Their power dynamic oscillates faster than a strobe. In one bravura sequence, she ties him to a motel shower rod with stockings once belonging to a stewardess killed in an unsolved hijacking. While riding him, she waxes nostalgic about her Girl Scout badge in knot-tying; the eroticism is undeniable, yet the underlying image—woman literally fastening man to relic of airline terrorism—renders voyeurism indictable. The film courts accusations of exploitative titillation, but the longer you stare, the more the scene implicates your own gaze as co-conspirator.

Take the editing choice to intercut their coupling with archival footage of decommissioned carnival rides being demolished by bulldozers. The metaphor—pleasure and dread bolted together on a carnival axle—lands harder than any manifesto. Compare this to Good Little Brownie, where eroticism was sanitized through pastoral haze; here, arousal smells of diesel and cordite.

The ending—impossible to spoil because it destabilizes the very concept—involves a celluloid fire that appears to consume the frame from the outside in. The last image we see is the camera’s own lens cracking, a spider web fracture that refracts the audience. I felt my reflection splinter into dozens of micro-viewers, each complicit, each terrified. When house lights rose, a man in the front row discovered his popcorn bag had been emptied not by snacking but by trembling; kernels had leapt out like fleas evacuating a burning dog.

Is Flirting with Terror dangerous? Absolutely. It weaponizes ambiguity, mails a letter bomb to moral certitude. Yet it also reinvigorates cinema’s pact with corporeal risk. Too many recent political thrillers—cite Australia’s Peril—treat ideology as spreadsheet. Here, dogma is pheromonal, a stain that seeps into seat fabric and refuses industrial solvent.

Technical specs worth noting: shot on expired 35 mm stock scavenged from Ukrainian archives, then re-bleached with ocean brine, resulting in emulsion pits that resemble dermatitis. Aspect ratio mutates from 1.33 to 2.39 mid-scene via in-camera lens whacking, creating a vertiginous funhouse effect. Projectionists report that some reels carry a vinegar odor indicating acetate decay; the film is literally rotting en route to premiere, a built-in memento mori.

Distribution antics amplify the anarchic ethos. Prints were couriered inside hollowed-out encyclopedias labeled Obsolescence, Vol. 3. Critics received boarding passes to non-existent flights; QR codes on the back linked to encrypted Vimeo streams that self-deleted after 24 hours. Such gimmicks flirt with pretension, yet they extend the narrative into meatspace, turning reception into scavenger hunt.

Box office? Irrelevant. The movie’s economy is affective: how many nightmares can you lease, how many dinner conversations can you poison? Weeks after screening, I catch myself recoiling from motel art, convinced the pastoral prints conceal detonator diagrams. Paranoia, like perfume, lingers.

Final paradox: the more zealously the film refuses message, the louder it resonates. By excising motive, it implicates viewers as co-authors of political meaning; we scribble our dread in the margins. That, perhaps, is the most insidious flirtation of all—cinema that seduces you into building your own bomb, then leaves you alone to defuse it in the dark.

It doesn’t end; it just decays at 24 frames per second.