‘Black Flies’ Review: Saving Lives Is Hell in Brutal Sean Penn Drama

thewrap.com:

It’s probably instructive to go into “Black Flies” knowing that the title comes from insects that can smell death before we can, and that show up on screen swarming a dead, rotting body in a bathtub.And it might help to know that the drone that gradually surfaces under the hysterical opening scene resolves itself into the overture to “Das Rheingold,” which returns at the end of the film. “Black Flies” is darkness and chaos on an operatic scale – maybe even a Wagnerian scale, though viewers may feel as if they’ve been assaulted by heavy metal (say, Judas Priest’s “Evil Never Dies,” which also appears in the film) rather than immersed in the warring gods of the Ring cycle.Screening in the Main Competition at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, “Black Flies” is visceral and vicious.

It is directed by French-born, New York-based Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire with an eye for the worst squalor NYC has to offer, and edited to be the kind of unrelenting barrage that can be thrilling when it doesn’t go so far overboard as to be infuriating.Then again, it seems that the very point of the existence of “Black Flies” is to go overboard.

Sauvaire’s first two features, “Johnny Mad Dog” and “A Prayer Before Dawn,” were brutal looks at child soldiers and prison, respectively, and “Black Flies” immediately insists that the world of New York paramedics isn’t going to be any kinder.It starts with Ollie Cross (Tye Sheridan) in the back of an ambulance on his way to a scene where multiple people have been shot.

The scene is set in quick flashes of Ollie, his gloves, the flashing light, and with a cacophony of blaring sirens, shouts and gasps for air; then the back doors to the ambulance open, and the chaos really begins.