He Never Died (2015)
Director: Jason Krawczyk
Writer: Jason Krawczyk
Producers: Zach Hagen; Adrienne Stern
Notable Cast: Henry Rollins; Booboo Stewart; Steven Ogg; Jordan Todosey
Run Time: 99 minutes
Language: English
Restrictions: 18 for violence and language
Genres: Horror; Thriller; Comedy
He Never Died is a black comedy film that documents the events of reclusive, stoic Jack (Henry Rollins) after his estranged daughter Andrea (Jordan Todosey) finds her way in to his life. Throughout the course of the film we come to see the plainness of Jack’s life offset by the outgoing, party spirit of Andrea and the high-octane, violent life of the gang bent on capturing him. Throughout it all Jack tries to maintain his fragile grasp on his normalcy, quietly picking himself back up after every pitfall.
When we first see Jack he’s asleep in his apartment, plagued by the sounds of war and destruction from times gone by. And it’s only after he takes part in one of his thrice-weekly bingo sessions do these noises fall away and leave him with what the audience starkly sees as blissful peace following the audio aftermath. This is something that becomes a theme in the film. Violence is alluded to - through its consequence, through shadows, through objective commentary - more than it is actually shown. As the film progresses and we discover that Jack is in fact the biblical Cain and has seen millennia of violence that he believes he is the root cause of, it is easy to understand why this would be. Jack wants to distance himself from all this pain as much as he can. And since we as the audience experience the world through Jack, we, too, are separate from the violence to a degree.
Unfortunately, this separation does not extend to the rest of the sympathetic characters, with all of them being either physically or emotionally hurt. Jeremy (Booboo Stewart) is Jack’s intern for a job that pays well but which we know nothing about. He is the first character to feel the damage that association with Jack causes, being tortured by the gang with a vendetta against Jack and spending almost the entirety of the movie off-screen and in a hospital. Gillian, Jack’s ex-wife and Andrea’s mother, is never shown on screen, but after the gang kidnaps Andrea in an attempt to bait Jack, she is murdered. Again, this act is said, but never shown. At the end of the film when Andrea is rescued, she is bruised and bleeding and in need of urgent medical care, but we don’t see her being tortured. Cara (Kate Greenhouse), a waitress at the diner Jack frequents is subject to intense trauma after seeing the violence that Jack is so separate from.
I think this factor of the film is an interesting play on the concept of “show don’t tell”. It is completely reversed and adds to the character of Jack as distant, almost emotionless and stoic. If every violent scene was played in full, the movie would run the risk of being a testosterone-fueled action flick; something that, in my opinion, the tone does not support.
He Never Died seems to be as much a story about addiction as it is about fatherhood and family. Right from the start, Jack is shown to be the antithesis of a ‘people person’, doing the bare minimum in this modern world in the way of paying rent, going for walks and frequenting a diner, but he is a man of few words and fewer facial expressions.
Andrea is everything Jack is not. From her youth to her clothes to her loud, rambunctious, devil-may-care attitude, she acts as a way for the audience both to get to know Jack more and for Jack to see himself in someone else. Just like Jack, Andrea has an addictive personality. The difference being her poison comes in the form of alcohol and Adderall, not human flesh. Both toe the line of sobriety and both break it. Andrea gets drunk and Jack looks after her - begrudgingly - until she sobers up. Jack’s drink at the diner gets spiked and after his own abduction by the gang he lapses into cannibalism to satiate himself. But while he feels stronger, he turns on his family. No longer the one to protect Andrea, it is not long before she falls in to the gang’s grasp.
This vendetta against Jack is one of the two sides of family the film deals with. The gang is run by Alex (Steven Ogg), the son of the man that Jack used to be employed by as a bodyguard - an invincibility to everything does make for some excellent security. In a final monologue after a relatively non-violent fight, it is revealed that Jack killed Alex’s father and Alex is bent on revenge. Alex wants Jack dead for killing his father and Jack wants Alex dead for hurting his daughter and Jeremy, who can be seen as Jack’s surrogate son. In the end, Jack doesn’t kill Alex, but instead takes Andrea to the hospital. This marks him trying again to control his addictions. But instead of being reclusive like he has in the past, he is now doing it by connecting with Andrea and, to an extent, Cara.
Most stories follow the turning points of the well-known hero’s journey, and this is no different. Even if the ‘hero’ is the creator of the original sin.
In the biblical story of Cain, he kills his brother through a jealous rage brought on by feelings of being inadequate. He is punished for this murder and for bringing all murder in to the world by being forced to walk the earth for eternity. In one of the first shots of the film, the audience is shown two deep scars on Jack’s back, in the place wings might have been. But there is no reference to Cain ever being angelic, or demonic for that matter, so it is also possible that these scars are in some way a reference to the ‘Mark of Cain’. Regardless, they don’t seem to have any role in the film, besides being the only wounds he ever has. He gets shot multiple times throughout the film and by eating is completely healed, so even if the scars are not brought up, there is no doubt they hold some greater significance, be that biblical, historical or simply something in Jack’s life.
Adding on to the idea of eating and healing, food seems to hold a certain amount of weight in the film. One of the only places Jack visits is a diner, going there every day for years. When he visits the diner the day after meeting Andrea, she makes a fuss about him being vegetarian after he orders an eggplant, claiming he looks like someone who eats a lot of meat. Later in the film, back at the diner after Andrea’s kidnapping, he orders a rare steak. The more wounded he becomes, the more flesh he consumes, eating the fingers off one of the gang members to heal his head after multiple gunshot wounds. He is immortal, but he still needs to heal. If the idea of his cannibalism being an addiction is to carry through, this could be cause for some concerning implications. While the reason something is addictive is because it makes the user feel good, flesh literally heals Jack. But the film also shows the other more sinister side to this. The more flesh Jack consumes, the more violent he becomes. The more violent he becomes, the more he needs to heal. The more he needs to heal, the more flesh he needs to consume. And on and on until he finds something bigger than this addiction. In the case of the film, that something is the eventual connections with Cara and Andrea.
While this is a violent thriller first and foremost, the dry, dark humour is not lost. Admittedly, Rollins’ deadpan line delivery took me a third of the movie to warm up to, but once I did nearly every other line had some form of flat humour written in to it. Most notably I think is a line spoken after Andrea’s kidnapping. In an effort to distance himself from it, Jack attempts to continue life as normal. He goes to the diner. He goes on walks. He sleeps in his apartment. While walking Cara to her apartment, the question of Andrea’s whereabouts comes up. Knowing the gravity of the situation, Jack responds to Cara’s question with:
“She’s probably with her mother at this point.”
Which leads to a question about divorced parents and no follow up on how certain Jack is that Andrea is dead. Because, of course, Cara has no idea.
After being maced during an attempted interrogation from these, frankly, unintimidating gang thugs, Jack goes to the diner where Cara instantly notices the damage. As he is still on his vegetarian diet, he isn’t healing too quickly and blames the mace burns on his landlady.
“Isn’t your landlord like... 90 years old?” Cara asks.
“Yeah.” Jack replies, “But she’s spry.”
And the deadpan, dry delivery makes the one-liners far more funny than if they were animated or had any other form of attention drawn to them. They kept the pacing of the story flowing from scene to scene, diner to bingo to apartment. And throughout it all the sense that Jack has seen everything and done everything is always alluded to in both his tone and his dialogue. Jack is tired. He literally spends the vast majority of his time asleep and has notably less energy than everyone he interacts with, including spry old landlady Ruth. He talks little because to him there is nothing new to say. He follows the same routine because there is nothing new to do. He is jaded from the world and his character reflects that brilliantly. And through it all he still finds a way to learn to care for Andrea, the daughter he never knew he had or wanted.
He Never Died is the movie I didn’t know I wanted to see. The title is terrible, the introduction meant I didn’t warm up to the film as quickly as I could have. Overall, for a film rated so high for violence, it is extremely lackluster.
But there is still something about it that made me stay to the end. The characters are organic and loveable, everyone from sour Jack to bright Andrea, practical Cara to obnoxious Alex. Everyone has their own part to play.
However, throughout the film a shadowy figure with a hat and a goatee follows Jack around. He is the only person who is seemingly stronger than Jack and only he and Andrea can see him. When the man appears, Jack cannot kill his intended victim, and Jack treats him like the enemy. But we get no clarification on who this man is in the movie or what his greater role is. It is shown that he isn’t God as Jack curses her out for allowing this man to be a part of his punishment, too. It left the film on a cliffhanger, but with not enough clues to the role he plays, it’s not a cliffhanger that will stay with me.
I think, all things considered, this movie has earned a fair score of 6/10.