[FANTASIA 2019] ‘THE ART OF SELF DEFENSE’ Review

I think The Art of Self Defense is a unique experience. Yes, there are obvious influences: tones of Jody Hill’s masculine delusions in The Foot Fist Way, Jared Hess’s oddities in Napoleon Dynamite, and Noah Baumbach’s emotionally stunted The Squid and the Whale (also starring Jesse Eisenberg) immediately came to mind.  But this deadpan delivery of a razor sharp script, from a perfect cast — the driest of the dry — is the film’s ultimate weapon, and there is nothing quite like it. To call this movie a satire is an understatement, and to call it black comedy does it a disservice. The movie exists on a different plane. If there’s a genre here, it’s blunt-force-socially-aware-comedy. Writer-director Riley Stern’s sophomore feature after the great Faults is a force of reckoning.

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Casey (Eisenberg) is a comically meek person. Zero self esteem. He’s the kind of guy who will interject into a conversation with people he doesn’t know, for no other reason than to be an awkward figure in the room. After a late night walk ends in a vicious beating from a group of motorcyclists, Casey attempts to get a gun for protection. When he isn’t able to get that immediately, he pursues another option: karate. After observing a children’s instructor Anna (Imogen Poots), Casey meets a man known only as Sensei (Alessandro Nivolo), the man who runs the dojo. He takes an interest in Casey and offers a free introductory class. This evolves into becoming a student, which quickly escalates into becoming serious enough to enter the night classes. It’s quickly established that these classes are…rather extreme. Fully enveloped now, Sensei begins to take a little more control over Casey’s life, whether he likes it or not.

Biting, hilarious, bizarre, psychotic, shocking, and surprisingly dark; this movie is completely my thing. Eisenberg is great, Poots is great, but the complete stand out is Nivolo. He is simultaneously absurdly funny and absolutely terrifying. An actor who is always good, he takes this toxic-alpha character and creates one of the most fascinating villains in recent memory. Sensei’s goals are rather unclear, he simply wants to build a real man out of Casey in all of the wrong ways. He’s a sociopathic, emotionless John Kreese from The Karate Kid. His take on karate isn’t to build confidence, it’s aggression — it’s to create dominance. By Sensei’s influence, Casey’s learning French is replaced with German, and his adult contemporary musical taste is replaced with metal. Once Casey begins to turn himself into Sensei’s vision, the results are hysterically grim. Eisenberg as aggressor is rather disarming and unpredictable, and Poots is a perfectly damaged supporter.

Clearly I enjoyed this movie to death, but it’s not perfection. It’s readily apparent there’s a secret dangling early on which I found a bit obvious, but maybe it was intended that way. There’s also a bit of the middle section of the movie that loses some steam, and I’m not entirely sure how I felt about the ending yet, but overall the experience was wonderful. Like all dark comedy, this is absolutely not for a majority of people. However, the masculine satire is so sharply vicious and the nature of the characters and story so strange that you could find yourself surprised to enjoy it. Likely a top 10 contender for me, and I can’t help but recommend it…I’m too weak not to.

Good news! In addition to playing at Fantasia 2019, The Art of Self Defense is in limited theatrical release right now and will be in theaters nationwide this Friday.