There is no particularly comfortable way to talk about the August Underground trilogy. It is deliberately ugly, confrontational, and difficult to separate from the violence it depicts. On the surface, the films are built around degradation, misogyny, nihilism, and cruelty. Those qualities are legitimate reasons to dislike them. But reducing the trilogy to the things it puts on screen misses what makes Fred Vogel's work interesting to me in the first place.
I wanted to get this one done in August, but because of the subject matter, I've gone through several different drafts over the past two years. It was originally going to be what I wrote for my comeback. I kept coming back to it because I wanted to make sure I didn't ignore the films' sexism or their deliberately misogynistic content in a way that could give someone the wrong impression of why I'm interested in them. I come to these films from a very specific perspective. Not one of infatuation, and certainly not one that requires ignoring the very real problems with what they depict.
The first August Underground feels less interested in entertaining an audience than in making one uncomfortable and leaving questions behind after the credits. By stripping away the conventional safety rails of cinema, Vogel creates something that asks what happens when violence stops being a cinematic event and becomes ordinary. The camera doesn't give you the comfort of a conventional protagonist, a moral framework, or even the assurance that what you're watching is being presented for your enjoyment. There is an ugliness to that which is difficult to sit with, but underneath it is a genuine interest in the effect of violence on the people committing it, the normalization of cruelty, and the psychological distance between watching something horrible and participating in it.
Mordum is where that approach becomes much harder for me to defend artistically. It feels less interested in the questions underneath the first film and more interested in discovering just how far the material can be pushed. The extremity becomes the substance. I've tried watching it twice and still haven't finished it, despite getting roughly thirty minutes from the end. If the trilogy were simply a contest to determine which film could be the most depraved, Mordum would probably be the obvious winner. But that's precisely why it is my least interesting entry. Shock by itself doesn't leave me with much to think about.
Penance, however, brings the ideas back into focus. It is my favorite of the trilogy because the extremity finally feels inseparable from the characters themselves. Rather than simply escalating the violence, the film becomes increasingly interested in what that world is doing to the people inside it. The characters aren't merely committing horrific acts. They are being consumed by the world they've created, and the psychological deterioration becomes as important as the violence itself. The horror isn't simply what they do to other people. It is what their own behavior ultimately does to them.
That distinction is important to me because I don't watch extreme cinema looking for cruelty to be cool. If that were the appeal, Mordum would be my favorite film in the trilogy. If torture being entertaining were the point, there are countless other films I'd prefer. Instead, I'm interested in what happens when filmmakers deliberately push against the boundaries of what an audience is comfortable watching, and whether there is anything meaningful waiting on the other side of that discomfort.
That's also why owning films like August Underground doesn't mean endorsing what they depict. I can be fascinated by a piece of extreme cinema while finding the material itself repulsive. In fact, sometimes that tension is the entire reason the work stays with me. The goal isn't necessarily to walk away thinking a movie was "good" or "bad." Sometimes the more interesting question is why it made you feel something, why you wanted to look away, and what remained in your head after it was over.
That's what August Underground represents to me. Not entertainment. Not an endorsement of its worldview. Not even necessarily something I want to revisit often.
A threshold.
A place where cinema becomes uncomfortable enough that the viewer has to decide for themselves what they're willing to look at, what they think it means, and what they carry with them when the screen goes black.
Filed September 24, 2026
