REVIEW ‘ZERO KILLED’ @ SOCYBERTY
by Spencer Hawken | Socyberty, Sept 29, 2012
A documentary filmmaker asks a group of people how they would like to kill someone, then allows them to live out that fantasy.
In 1996 filmmaker Michael Kosakowski started talking to people from different backgrounds about murder. He asked the people involved about if they were to murder someone, how they would do it? He offered the people involved the opportunity to carry out their wishes (obviously through acting), as long as they were the ones who performed the murders themselves. Ten years after carrying out the project, he returned to see those same people, to look at their murders, and ask them their views on the killings, and how they feel now, about their murders, and the society we live in.
Zero Killed is an intriguing documentary, with a variable sliding scale of depressive scenes and attitudes, to very light hearted moments, and hysterical “deaths”. Of course on a movie that focuses on death however, it is bound to be the more depressive points that dominate the agenda.
Kosakowski makes a very profound, but ultimately very true statement with his film. The movie is a very surreal experience; to hear the people involved discussing murder in the same way you may talk about going to the shops to buy a loaf of bread is a very sobering aspect.
The most revealing part of the movie is what it says about you, because it goes without saying that every person in their life contemplates, even in the most “sane” way, what it would be like to kill someone, and how you would do it. To hear teachers, actors, artists, office workers, and other people in trusted positions, discussing death, makes you feel a little bit more normal, you consider those acts of killing as a very taboo thing, how many of us actually discuss with others our killing fantasies? No we don’t we keep them to ourselves because of fear of persecution.
While the documentary is very good, and very revealing, you cannot help but feel that it’s not been edited together as well as it could be. Towards the middle it gets very laboured, and a little bit too overpowering, The reality is it becomes very boring, and monotonous, and it’s sad because it taints and goes against all the good work it had done previously, and following that midsection. Some of the less interesting killings, and characters with those murders in mind, get far too much attention, while others get literally a few seconds, the balance could without a doubt be a lot better.
Zero Killed is without a doubt a powerful movie, but it’s not something that is best served in it’s existing format in one go, it needs some division (so ideally watched at home on DVD) or a re-edit, to make it as intriguing as it could be. It definitely needs to be seen, but it’s only fair to highlight it’s flaws.
Zero Killed – Official Movie Site 
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