Vincent Must Die
Directed by Stéphan Castang
Screenplay by Mathieu Naert
Starring Karim Leklou, Vimala Pons, Francois Chattot, Ulysse Genevrey, Karoline Rose Sun, & Emmanuel Vérité.

Comedy / Drama / Fantasy

★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay
contains slight spoilers.
Turn back,
lest ye be spoiled!

In an increasingly hostile world, Stéphan Castang’s Vincent Must Die—which had its North American premiere recently at the Fantasia International Film Festival—is a darkly funny and sometimes unsettling look at the violent, unempathetic breakdown of contemporary existence. Vincent (Karim Leklou) is an average office worker, but one day, after making a silly joke about interns, he’s attacked by an intern. What seems like a strange one-off moment suddenly becomes a recurring visitation of violence upon Vincent. He’s later attacked even more violently by a co-worker, and eventually people in the street start to attack him. Vincent tries to make sense of his predicament, only to find out that there are other people experiencing the same phenomena. He eventually meets Margaux (Vimala Pons) and they share a connection. But can that last? Will Margaux someday attack Vincent? This is where Vincent has to decide whether life is worth living alone, or if he has the will to fight to create a caring, empathetic space in the world.

There are a few potential ways to read Vincent Must Die, though the most interesting is to view the film as a tale of microaggressions: the myriad microaggressions that we’re supposed to sit with, swallow, take lying down in the corporate world, but also in the rest of the world, too. As the story moves from Vincent’s office job in the towers of capitalism to the street, Vincent’s home, Margaux’s home, so does the logic of bureaucracy, which would have us all believe that the competition and violence intrinsic to the modern capitalist/industrialised world belongs in our everyday lives. Castang’s film isn’t all pessimism, though, even if things get more bleak the longer the story wears on. Through Vincent and Margaux, Castang presents an empathetic vision of a caring world amidst all the anger, turmoil, and violence; if only we’re willing to work for it.The first few scenes in Vincent Must Die are pure satire of the corporate, bureaucratic world and its approach to conflict in the workplace. Vincent seems a bit out of touch, as he makes his intern joke and everybody quietly cringes, however, it’s really the people managing the office who are out of touch. When Vincent is assaulted viciously by another coworker, after the intern has already attacked him, he’s brought to a meditation with a manager and his attacker. He’s made to feel that his attack—a horrific stabbing that mangles his hand—is just “work pressure” that’s built up in his coworker. Even worse, the boss acts like Vincent is the issue, that the attacks are distracting others in the office, so he forces Vincent to work remotely; neither the intern, nor the stabber are fired, either. Because, for the boss and his capitalist duties, production is key: as long as work can continue, it doesn’t matter to the corporate bureaucracy who’s doing it, or what conditions it’s happening in, even if it means employing people taken to violent fits of rage and ultimately laying blame on their victim(s). We can parallel Vincent’s situation to the real world in a number of ways, from women reporting sexual harassment in the workplace who have their allegations ignored while their tormentor is allowed to keep working in the same space, to those who need accommodations in the workplace for disabilities (etc) and get treated like they’re a disturbance. These are just some of the microaggressions perpetuated in all sorts of different workplaces, which Vincent Must Die evokes through a darkly comic perspective on today’s corporate world.

Castang uses recurring images of the industrial that hover and loom in the film’s background, and they come to represent a modern terror, the “generalised climate of violence” that is constantly lurking, waiting to swallow us all whole in its mouth of anger. In one scene after Vincent rescues a pit bull, he and the dog sit on a beach where an oil platform appears large in the frame’s distance; the industrial world of oil and its extraction stand in the background, always informing how the world and the people in it operate. In the background of other scenes there are the pollutive smokestacks of industrial factories spewing toxins into the atmosphere, or electrical towers and their wires filling up the sky like the grid of a chessboard. The pit bull itself becomes a symbol pertaining to the violence of industrialised society. Pit bulls are sadly discriminated against as violent dogs, but it is their owners who make them violent, it is not an inherent quality in them. And this is just like humans: the natural state of humanity is not violent; violence in humans comes from the societies and the forces which shape them, like capitalism and industrialisation. So while the industrial world hangs over everything and its violence trickles down into people’s everyday lives, Vincent and his pit bull are two vivid reminders that the world is not naturally violent, and there is potential for a caring world to shape things differently.
The industrial imagery casts a shadow over the film, one of indifference to humans and human emotion, which sits in contrast to the way Vincent and Margaux refuse to give up on each other, despite both having tried to attack and kill each other at various points. Empathy is missing today all across the globe, in all kinds of societies, and it is the empathy Vincent and Margaux show for each other, as well as others, that helps them survive. Even earlier in the film, Vincent tells his therapist that he isn’t mad at the people attacking him since he knows “they‘re not themselves” and he reserves his anger instead for those who cannot empathise, the people who don’t believe what he’s going through since it’s not happening to them. Another significant tie here is the way the violence in the film is based upon sight. Late in the film, Vincent tries to strangle Margaux to death, but she manages to put her hands over his eyes and, soon, he lets go, reverting back to his regular self. The message here is that seeing is not always believing. We cannot see each other’s emotions, we cannot see the traumas of other people, we are not able to look at someone’s past like a picture in a book; we have to use our empathy to understand people, not our sight, and we have to believe others, just as Vincent, and others being attacked, wish to be believed. There is a certain blind faith in empathy that we have to embrace, even sometimes when it’s uncomfortable, and Vincent Must Die depicts this brilliantly through hands over eyes and blindfolds that Margaux/Vincent use to keep alive in a terrible world.

At the start of the film, one of Vincent’s coworkers is recounting a surreal dream he had about seeing his mother in a large field where there is a “huge herd of deer” and, out of nowhere, his mother starts sprouting antlers. This sets the film up to be about the herd instinct of our industrialised world, and not to protect the herd, but rather to compete with and destroy others in the herd to get ahead. The Sentinel website that appears when Vincent discovers he is not alone in being attacked is described as being for “hunter–gatherers,” which is a curious term to use, and fits with themes in the film about the modern world’s inherent violence. Those who are being attacked become ostracised from modern existence, to the point they start to consider themselves “hunter–gatherers,” reverting to a pre-industrial, and even pre-agrarian, identity out of necessity. In this reference to hunting and gathering is a recognition that the current capitalist world is just as brutal, if not more so, as previous formations in society.  To combat the modern world’s hatred and violence we must revert not to hunting and gathering, but to a sense of community based in empathy, a community that cares about one another, about each other’s survival; a world in which we all survive, not just those willing to eat everyone else alive.