After premiering in France in June 2023 and screening at a variety of genre film festivals like Fantasia International Film Festival, Slash Film Festival, and FrightFest under the name Farang (a Thai term meaning “foreigner”), IFC Films snagged director Xavier Gens’s (Hitman) latest project and renamed it Mayhem!. Considering the action direction and first unit direction is overseen by Gangs of London’s Jude Poyer, the change in title for North American distribution makes a great deal of sense, easily conveying the physical intensity that accompanies each of Nassim Lyes’s lead character Samir’s increasingly challenging skirmishes and frays. However, the original title does a better job of communicating the emotional journey that screenplay writers Gens and Magali Rossitto, in conjunction with Stéphane Cabel (The Brotherhood of the Wolf) and Guillaume Lemans (The Night Eats the World), send Samir on, one in which violence is a response that leads to increased isolation, not salvation.
Nassim Lyes as Samir in Xavier Gens’ MAYHEM! Courtesy of Thanaporn Arkmanon. An IFC Films Release.
While out on temporary parole a day before he’s set to go back to court to hopefully end his sentence, figures from Samir’s past appear and things go horribly wrong. Five years later in Thailand, Samir has started over, complete with quiet day job, wife Mia (Loryn Nounay), and stepdaughter Dara (Chananticha Tang-Kwa). More than that, Samir and Mia have a dream to open their own restaurant on a piece of beach-front property where they can make something for themselves and have a real future. But when that property is bought out from under them, Sam goes to speak to the buyer, Narong (Olivier Gourmet), hoping to appeal to him and change his mind. What Sam gets is an offer for work which, if completed, will result in Sam’s request. Caught between getting back into the world he tried to escape and getting their dream, Sam does the job for Narong, unaware that by dipping his toe back into treacherous waters, he risks losing his freedom and all he holds dear.
L-R: Nassim Lyes as Samir and Loryn Nounay as Mia in Xavier Gens’ MAYHEM! Courtesy of Thanaporn Arkmanon. An IFC Films Release.
Mayhem! is a tight 99-minute film in which Gens utilizes a fairly minimalist approach in order to maximize everything to its fullest utility. The opening is a mixture of physical performance from Lyes and natural conversation between characters, mostly others speaking to Lyes’s Samir, thereby creating all we need to know about who Samir was and who he is now well before this story’s inciting incident occurs. In the opening, for instance, we observe Samir running boxing drills with someone in a weight room, people exercising around him, his reaction time and movements lightning fast and impactful. This quickly establishes Samir’s fighting prowess and, before we can presume this means Samir is a typical fighter looking to throw punches, a fight breaks out and guards come in, establishing place and shifting what we think of Samir given his position as inmate. However, it’s Lyes’s physical response to the fighting, that he makes Samir almost become smaller (eyes lower; shoulders drop) as the fighting occurs before him, that makes the largest impact. Clearly he can do some damage if he joined the fray, but he refuses, preferring to humble himself through non-reaction rather than put his potential parole (before we even know he’s up for it) in jeopardy. Even later, when fighting is his only option, Lyes doesn’t play Samir as fully committed to what it means to throw hands for the majority of the film. Too often revenge actioners center a character who, despite a desire stay out of the fight, does so with both skill and psychological acceptance. The way Lyes plays things, Samir is just a person who’s going deeper and deeper into a world he did his time to escape, struggling to cope with the bloodshed before him. This gives the plot of Mayhem! additional and unexpected weight.
L-R: Sahajak Boonthanakit as Sombat and Nassim Lyes as Samir in Xavier Gens’ MAYHEM! Courtesy of Thanaporn Arkmanon. An IFC Films Release.
Before we dig into what the stunts come to represent on Samir’s journey, one needs to acknowledge the execution. Poyer is a stuntperson (The Medallion; Ultraviolet; Kingsman: The Secret Service; Star Wars: The Force Awakens; Apostle), experienced as a Second Unit/Assistant Director (Romeo vs. Juliet; Tiger Claw), and as an actor (Knock Off; A Man Called Hero; 28 Weeks Later) and you can see the evidence of all this experience on the screen within his work as action/second unit director here. The fights are choreographed not for endurance, but for carnage delivered swiftly. In nearly each altercation that Samir finds himself in, the longer the fights take, the more likely he’s going to fail on whatever objective he’s focused on. This means that each blow needs to be powerful and each reaction as fast as the previous one. Aiding the intensity, the cinematography and editing in these scenes understand the language and flow of a fight in order to carry the momentum between cuts or camera angles, all without reducing the intensity of the quarrel. This appears in the form of the camera pitching in tandem with characters as they tumble, timing it so that we can see Samir spin and lose none of the perceived momentum as we cut over to the foot connecting with the target, and then shifting the camera’s position to establish a perspective that makes a violent takedown all the more brutal because we can identify exactly what’s happening to Samir’s opponent. All of this ensures that the audience understands the geography of the scene so as better to follow who’s who and what’s happening. Especially as things grow more intense emotionally and, therefore, requiring the fights to equally match that intensity, making heads or tails of what’s happening and to whom matters because we need to understand how Samir is reacting to all of it. At first, not well at all, speaking a great deal of who he is and how he views the necessity of his actions moving forward. Samir is not John Wick or Bryan Mills, he’s just a man in over his head doing the best he can with the shit hand he’s been dealt by choice and consequences.
Nassim Lyes as Samir in Xavier Gens’ MAYHEM! Courtesy of Thanaporn Arkmanon. An IFC Films Release.
Because Gens keeps Mayhem! tight throughout, there’s little time to linger on anything, which is fine given that there are few holes within the narrative in which to draw complaints. In fact, the emphasis on show-not-tell works so well that it’s not until the credits roll that one recognizes just how much we come to know and understand about this world. It’s in the way Lyes plays Samir, the execution and editing of the fights, and even in the way the edits come to interact with the score from composer Jean-Pierre Taïeb (Stillwater) where the collaboration between Taïeb and editor Riwanon Le Beller (Galveston) results in the audience feeling the energy of Bangkok and the way it propels the characters there. There’s so much technical proficiency on display here that one choice in the conclusion, even as emotionally impactful and resonant to the whole as it is, results in (for this reviewer) a souring on what is otherwise a positively bone-breaking experience.
Nassim Lyes as Samir in Xavier Gens’ MAYHEM! Courtesy of Thanaporn Arkmanon. An IFC Films Release.
If one were to try to reduce Mayhem! down to a comparison to a single film, the closest would be John Wick (2014). Samir’s journey is one of reluctance where he just wants to live his life without the trials and tribulations of who he was before. That the past keeps haunting him, infecting and impacting his present, pushing him into situations resulting in blood on his hands and more trauma. Unlike the retired assassin who so easily falls back on old habits, the muscle memory required for killing deep in the pores of his bones, we get a man, through Lyes’s performance, who’s a good fighter with the skill and technique to kill who wrestles with what it means to take a life. The end of Mayhem! closes the book on this specific chapter of Samir’s life, but it’s clear, just as John Wick slowly walks into the night, that there’s going to be doing some deep rebuilding in the wake of this tale. The difference being that where John can sleep at night, one truly does wonder how long the mayhem will reside within and what it means for tomorrow and tomorrow’s tomorrow.
In theaters, VOD, and digital January 5th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official IFC Films Mayhem! webpage.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: Films To Watch, In Theaters, Recommendation, Reviews, streaming
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