Raising Cain [DVD] [1993]

Borrowing from such veins like Hitchcock' Psycho with some William Peter Blatty documentary atmosphere. What you have here is a truly under appreciated thriller. Lithgow is awesome here, providing a truly varied and crazy performance throught the character(s) ordeal. He is able to play so many personalities and does so here in this story of a man conflicted with many personalities and a father that turned him into a monster. The female lead is a horrible actor, dont care what she has done in the past or what she is doing now...her acting is dire and one toned at the points in the film where she would be very distraght and stressed... Raising Cain will no doubt get a remake treatment in say 4 years but it should be checked out. There is one scene that lasted around four minutes without a cut which I thought was an impressive bit of filmaking, rare these days.

This film is going to make you feel berserk and even maybe completely corrugated. Cain has been haunting Semitic and Western civilizations like hell - the proper word of course - since the birth of Ra. There is always somewhere in the godly, godlike and divine families a treacherous brother in a way or another. Strangely enough Freud preferred the treacherous only son, Oedipus, but the spectre of Cain is still flying high and strong in the sky of western and even slightly more than western consciousness.

Brian de Palma had to invent a trick to make it slightly more interesting than just the bad younger brother who killed his elder brother. So he goes rake in the ashes of psychoanalysis with a lot of popular people vestment and sauce and comes up with the mad scientist, in this case mad psychoanalyst who decided to test his theory about split personalities on his own son.

The idea is simple and it is said to be natural and the perversion is only the activation of it by a doctor and a father. Anyone has one personality and every single time they do something wrong or are afraid of doing something wrong they just shift the responsibility to a phantasmagorical brother Cain who takes the blame and you are free and clean like a virgin. This of course happens in your mind and you can always yell at that brother before he does the wrong thing and that's it.

In this case we have somewhere a father who has been forced to develop a double personality by his own father. This bad Cain in him makes him steal children for his father to go on experimenting on live guinea pigs, or guinea fowls if you prefer feathered birds to bristled mammals, And then the wife, the daughter, and everyone else does not know what is happening except that bodies turn up here and there and children disappear from here and there.

There will be a very good ending since only grownups and women die (don't tell me Brian de Palma is sexist), and a very bad ending since Cain has migrated into virtual reality and can now navigate in the world without having nothing to say to anyone and no account to give though a lot of account to settle.

Poor Cain. To be like that cursed to death and forever just because God decided not to favour his present of fruits of the soil and preferred the animal presents from Abel. God cursed Cain after he killed Abel and yet Cain is the father of music and arts and of metal work, hence of the metallurgy revolution that took place some time in the middle of the Neolithic transformation and made the conquest of Europe by a minority of Indo-Europeans possible since they had metal for ploughing the earth and for defending themselves.

Here de Palma only keeps the horror of the curse. Too bad because Cain is a child of light in spite of the curse God sent him: the future was not in migratory herd keepers but in sedentary agricultural workers. God had it all wrong in a way because God was a conservative conservationist. I guess God would vote against Monsanto and GMOs.

We should start a Cain alliance to bring together all those who have been the victims of some higher up bureaucrats who think they are Gods because they have an armchair in an air-conditioned office, and a lot of free time to do nothing at all except jerking their neuronal and neurotic dendrites.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Raisin Cain is a genius film. John Lithgow is exellent. This is Brian De Palma on top form. I can't say anything about the plot as I don't want to give anything a way. Watch this film!