[7]

Grieving the loss of his daughter, a surgeon kidnaps and surgically alters a young man to take her place. Yeah, Victim is creepy and kinky, charging into some subject matter that is sure to make many viewers cringe. The forced transformation from male to female is probably one of the most provocative, original ideas I’ve seen a horror film tackle in the last several years. As fascinated by gender studies as I am, the movie couldn’t possibly have lived up to my high hopes. The title character (a brave actor named Stephen Weigand) undergoes a brainwashing regiment that undercuts the impact of the physical horror he’s undergoing: breast implants, castration, hormone treatments, etc. While those steps in the transformation are more visceral, it’s some earlier scenes — while Weigand’s character still has some grasp on his identity — that disturbed me more. In one, he’s forced to put on a dress while a brute henchman watches. Weigand freaks out under the henchman’s lusty gaze. This moment of turning the “male gaze” on itself is the movie’s best, most horrifying moment. A last-minute plot twist adds nothing to the film’s impact, but Victim is conceptually fascinating, even if it barely scrapes the surface of its potential.