The Protagonists (region-free DVD)

Before making the international art-house hit Suspiria, A BIGGER SPLASH and I AM LOVE, Tilda Swinton and Luca Guadagnino first gelled when the maverick actress guided her filmmaker friend and crew in the investigation of the – unfortunately true – story of a horrific,senseless murder. Two teenagers ventured down from Oxford into London on a bloodlust impulse: believing their psychopathic delusion that this was some special-forces type challenge, the cowardly pair mercilessly murdered an innocent passing motorist. The pair, Swinton-Guadagnino, (whose muse-director affinity is likened to hers and Derek Jarman’s) examine every physical and mental aspect of the crime, in an effort to understand both the intimate relationship between this out-of-the-ordinary act of violence and real life and also the way crime can affect the lives of any one of us; they present the viewer with – in the filmmaker’s words: “a nonliteral language of light, of space and time and behaviour. The language of the unexpected’’.