Brooklyn Horror 2025: ‘Crushed,’ a nihilistic and perverse film that lacks nuance and value

If you’ve made the poor life choice to watch A Serbian Film, writer/director Simon Rumley’s Crushed lives in that same depraved and nasty world. The film, which played this year’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, lacks thematic depth and cinematic sophistication. It’s disturbing for the sake of being disturbing. The narrative is needlessly bloated, with a pace so slow it’s like watching a six-hour film. A graphic and vicious snuff film of a kitten being crushed will make anyone’s stomach turn; its eyes bug out before the camera cuts away. The same can be said about the heavy, explicit implications of child sexual assault and murder. Crushed says nothing interesting about the cruelty of human nature or the struggle to hold onto one’s faith. It’s a brutally unnecessary film, and in 2025, it’s rather regressive.

Set in Bangkok, the story follows a young girl named Olivia (Margaux Dietrich), whose father Daniel (Steve Oram) is a man of the cloth. For Olivia’s birthday, he gifts her a cute orange kitten, which Olivia names Missy. She showers her new playmate with kisses and cuddles, but it’s all too good to be true. After a friend shows Olivia a grotesque snuff film of a little kitten being crushed with high heels, she spirals out and frets over Missy being captured. Things get much worse when Daniel mistakenly leaves the front door open, and Missy escapes into the night. Olivia begins having the most terrible nightmares of Missy being captured by the people who made the snuff film, and she plots to find her baby. While out searching for her, Olivia stumbles upon a derelict home that bears a striking resemblance to the room in the video.

Stanley (Christian Ferriera), the man behind the snuff film, kidnaps Olivia and sells her to pedophile and kid killer Mr. Jeffreys (Jonathan Samson). She’s tied up and left to wallow in the dirt. Her parents Daniel and May (Nattapohn Rawddon) do what any good person would do: turn to the police and demand justice. But Daniel preaches forgiveness, telling May that what they need to do is forgive as Jesus would do. May reveals that she doesn’t believe in God, and instead, she pleads for him to see reason. Over the course of their religious journey, they confront the horrors of the world and learn that forgiveness isn’t such an easy thing to bestow upon people as evil as Stanley and Mr. Jeffreys.

To say Crushed tests the patience of the audience is an understatement. Rumley, known for being a filmmaking provocateur, slathers the screen with poor editing and strange camera choices. The acting leaves much to be desired, as well, and coupled with the film’s perverse narrative, there’s not much value to be found. Despite taking place in Thailand, the film is predominantly in English, a real puzzling decision. Perhaps, if the cinematography (from director of photography Wade Muller) had been more finetuned with compelling stylistic flourishes, and the gross snuff film footage and child assault pulled back from the edge, there could have been something profound here.

What Crushed attempts is a thoughtful piece about sex trafficking and faith, but what we get instead is an infuriating, botched, and misguided attempt to provoke the audience. Instead of Crushed, you should watch Red Rooms instead — a provocative and engaging conversation piece done right.