Review: Conquest

Conquest is dark even by the usual standards of the dark fantasy genre. Armies of savage beast-men roam the untamed wilderness, slaughtering and pillaging indiscriminately; their luckiest victims die before they are dismembered and devoured. Pagan cults oppress and subjugate primitive tribes, demanding human sacrifices in order to “convince” the sun to rise each morning. Theft and murder are not merely commonplace—they are essential survival techniques; food is scarce in this setting, and competition for limited resources is therefore fierce and merciless. Magic unambiguously exists, but it is inherently demonic and evil in nature; the allegedly “benevolent” gods, on the other hand, are apparently indifferent to the suffering of mortals, intervening on behalf of their worshippers only when it is absolutely necessary.

I’d expect nothing less from Lucio Fulci, whose City of the Living Dead has haunted my nightmares ever since I caught it on Kanopy years ago. In that Lovecraftian horror movie, the apocalyptic stakes were made all the more suspenseful by the utter mundanity of the protagonists; painfully average, ordinary, and skeptical, these white bread urbanite characters were woefully unprepared to combat the supernatural forces of Hell. Every frame of Conquest is likewise fraught with deliciously unsettling tension, often conveyed through the simplest, subtlest stylistic techniques. In a particularly memorable sequence, for example, our hero—a young warrior from a foreign land on his coming-of-age journey—has been poisoned. His companion—an older nomadic local—leaves him lying by the riverside while he searches the nearby mountain for an enchanted flower capable of healing any ailment. As grotesque boils pulse and burst across the lad’s body, oozing a viscous mixture of blood and pus, the barbarian frantically navigates a seemingly endless sea of foliage, which fills the entirety of the screen—no matter how far the camera zooms out. The pervasive sense of dread that emerges when the burly figure is reduced to a barely perceptible speck amongst the trees is palpable and suffocating.

Featuring brutally excessive gore, charmingly low-budget special effects, a narrative that evokes the structure and themes of classical mythology, and a hazy, surreal, dreamlike atmosphere, Conquest elegantly splits the difference between European arthouse cinema and trashy exploitation film. It is probably an exaggeration to call it a “neglected masterpiece”—but it nevertheless deserves a lot more love and attention.