Dendera (2011) Reviews

• A highly original story or a septuagenarian fantasy?

  aland-32011-09-14

  Well, this one's original. An unnamed village has a unique way of celebrating a woman's seventieth birthday: she is ceremoniously carried up a nearby mountain and abandoned above the snow line, where she is expected to await entry to heaven. When this happens to Kayu (Ruriko Asaoka), she is rescued by a group of survivors who are scraping out an existence in a community they call Dendera. Led by a centenarian fireball, this gang of hobbling old women plans revenge: Kayu's arrival gives them enough troops to launch an attack aimed at massacring the entire village. We watch as Kayu's initial resistance to the harebrained plan morphs into conditional support even as Dendera's population is whittled down by bear attacks and an avalanche. The film's cache is that it carefully navigates the thin line between fantasy and plausibility.