By JOSHUA POLANSKI
Starring Jelena Djokić, Sergej Trifunović and Milutin Karadžić
Written and directed by Aleksandar Radivojević
Bad Tattoo
From the twisted mind of A Serbian Film co-writer Aleksandar Radivojević, one of the century’s most notorious and popularly controversial films, comes KARMADONNA, a gory and blasphemous feast of violence about Buddha (yes, that one) commanding a pregnant woman to kill criminals – or he will kill her baby.
The cadre she murders are some of the worst people imaginable: rapists, men who force abortions, corrupt cops and sex traffickers. Punk teenagers, annoying Instagrammers and self-help authors also get thrown into the mix, leveling out their disreputable characters with humanity’s worst. Radivojević’s Serbian directorial debut is the sacrilegious child of Saw and Lone Wolf and Cub, with irredeemable characters executing extrajudicial justice in a hellish society.
Jelena (Jelena Djokić) would do anything to protect her baby, and that’s why the Buddha picks her to do his bidding. He is not the loving and peaceful Siddhartha Gautama from popular religious tradition. He inherits a concept of karma from the real-life dharmic traditions and becomes the official enforcer of divine retribution. This isn’t the only sacrilegious element: The Buddha also gives Jelena the purest experience of an orgasm possible. A religious awakening accompanies her powerful climax. Serbia doesn’t have a Buddhist community of any significance, so the choice of the deity almost feels like a trite joke that was less likely to offend Balkan viewers than the other religious options on the table. That may be the only “safe choice” in the film.
Radivojević is clear that contemporary culture has turned the world upside down. Visually, cinematographer Aleksandar Jakonić communicates this with a rich supply of Dutch angles, where the axis of the camera is tilted as if to rhetorically convey instability. The score from Đorđe Miljenović does something similar with its isolated and unconnected chords that pierce the silence like screams before allowing the silence to take back over. The victims of the divine rampage also get at the world’s complete corruption. The evil of the criminals is both obvious and unoriginal, but the grouping of social media influencers and self-help authors adds something novel to the genre’s critique of culture.
Just like Hieronymus Bosch’s orgy of the damned in “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” the penultimate scene in one of the most disturbing movies to play at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival paints a hedonistic tableau of sex, violence, drugs and anything else normally regarded as taboo. One woman has her eyes replaced by ocularly penetrating burnt cigarettes. Everything gets washed in crimson, and the living are zombified into something between life and death.
There is no way around the elephant in the room for those who have seen the film: A man cuts off another man’s penis, removes the testicles with a blade, puts everything in a blender along with paint thinner and other appendages and organs, and then drinks the disgusting cannibalistic concoction. It’s more disgusting than any description can do justice. Half of the press screening cleared before this scene, if that gives you an idea of how sadistic and gory KARMADONNA is.
Radivojević has quickly established himself as one of the world’s most obscene filmmakers. If this appeals to you, you already know who you are. Everyone else should stay clear.
