by MARK SLUTSKY

A tense thriller shot in stark, widescreen, black and white, Géla Babluani’s 13 (Tzameti) is one of this year’s bigger film festival circuit discoveries. The low-budget French production is already slated for a Hollywood remake.

Somewhat of a family affair, the film stars Babluani’s brother George as Sébastien, an immigrant living in France who follows a mysterious set of instructions meant for his recently deceased employer, in hope of a big payoff. What he finds once he arrives at a mysterious house in the middle of nowhere, though, is a violent, deadly game where his life—along with 12 others’—could end at any second.

The young Georgian filmmaker (son of director Temur Babluani) moved to France as a teenager. “I came to France, and two years later I wrote the story,” he says. “I think my vision of humanity was really dark, and I wanted to make a movie about manipulation and about competition between men. And so I built this story step by step, and I came up with this game, this sort of Russian roulette, where life and death are really opposed.”

Tzameti’s high-contrast black-and-white palette contributes to the movie’s spare intensity. “I think that with black and white you lose some realism, because you lose the colours,” Babluani says, “But I think you have another kind of realism—we're more focused on the faces, on the story.”

Babluani’s less-is-more approach also applies to the film’s violence. While a lot of very brutally bad things happen in the film, you hardly actually see anything in the way of blood, gore or other graphic stuff. “Honestly, I think nobody today is surprised to see blood, to see heads exploding, with special effects,” he says.

“I saw in some screenings that people went like this,” he continues, making a cringing motion, “But nothing's happened! Of course, something has happened, but I think the tension is more psychological than visual.”

The threatening anonymity of the film’s characters, the fact that the men who run the deadly game are so ordinary looking, also ratchets up the tension. “It was really a very important point not to say who these people are,” he says. “Because these people, when you meet them in the street, you’d never know who these people really are. I really wanted to make something realistic, to not shoot these guys like bad guys, but like normal people. Because they’re like normal people, they’re not crazy. They’re normal, but they do these crazy things!”

If Babluani is worried about Tzameti getting lost in translation when the American remake happens next year, he’s not showing it. He has reason to be confident though, as he’s directing the film. “I really want to make something different,” he says. “Of course, when you do a remake you need to keep a big part of the original movie, but I really want to try to develop some other characters, try to really make a different movie.”

Part of that will include, by necessity, changing some of the elements that specifically characterized the original. For instance, “It's going to be in colour,” he says. “It's a challenge to make the movie in colour, to work with the same story but to not do the same movie. To try to really find the solution to make the movie about the same story—but in a different way.”

13 (Tzameti) opens this Friday, Nov. 3

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