S. Viknesh's Cold Pressed shows a bit of mild genius even before we get started: We've seen this film before when constructed around drug smuggling and other platforms of organized crime, but here Viknesh chooses a legal and seemingly innocuous trade - olive oil importation - and shows us that our corruption of a regulated system and our thirst for controlling trade lines elicits human behavior no different than those we see around their highly illicit counterparts.
The family tree of Cold Pressed clearly traces back to films like Scarface and The Godfather; not just in theme but in aesthetic tone. We see 1970's-evocative muted color tones in the film's finish; a subliminal masterstroke which leverages those great films in subtextual homage. An obvious student of the crime genre's history, Viknesh has also demonstrated the critical importance of male casting at the epicenter of these violent power struggles: With Cold Pressed, he's nailed that time-tested requirement, as Michael X. Sommers and Ted Harvey offer the prerequisite contrast of push-and-pull tension.
"We're not dealing cocaine here, Bobby. No one needs to get hurt." No surer guarantee in film that someone is about to get hurt, and when they do, it's presented with the classically bloodied gangster stylings our inner voice has come to demand from the genre. Indeed, that's a great thing. With Cold Pressed, Viknesh presents something that we're drawn to both because of its familiarity and its concurrently fresh spin, and in doing so, he succeeds in delivering a film that owns its own space in a historically illustrious field.
The family tree of Cold Pressed clearly traces back to films like Scarface and The Godfather; not just in theme but in aesthetic tone. We see 1970's-evocative muted color tones in the film's finish; a subliminal masterstroke which leverages those great films in subtextual homage. An obvious student of the crime genre's history, Viknesh has also demonstrated the critical importance of male casting at the epicenter of these violent power struggles: With Cold Pressed, he's nailed that time-tested requirement, as Michael X. Sommers and Ted Harvey offer the prerequisite contrast of push-and-pull tension.
"We're not dealing cocaine here, Bobby. No one needs to get hurt." No surer guarantee in film that someone is about to get hurt, and when they do, it's presented with the classically bloodied gangster stylings our inner voice has come to demand from the genre. Indeed, that's a great thing. With Cold Pressed, Viknesh presents something that we're drawn to both because of its familiarity and its concurrently fresh spin, and in doing so, he succeeds in delivering a film that owns its own space in a historically illustrious field.