The Limb Salesman

The Limb Salesman is the sort of flick one dreads encountering at a film festival, though it is inevitable. Pretentious and confusing, it’s impossible not to wonder just what the point of all this is supposed to be. Set in a future where birth defects are common, The Limb Salesman follows the title character as he travels to the home of an oddball family for the purpose of fitting a young woman with a pair of black-market legs (the whole practice of selling limbs has been outlawed). There are plenty of potentially intriguing ideas in Granofsky and Ingrid Veninger’s script – ie water has become incredibly rare and is more valuable than money – but with absolutely no backstory, such elements become more distracting than anything else (why is it that water is so scarce, and yet there are still oceans? Can’t someone build a filter of some kind?) But worse than that, there’s not a single compelling character here; with the limb salesman acting as sort of a straight man to the entire cast, we’re not given a whole lot of options in terms of figures worth rooting for. And because of the obvious low budget, The Limb Salesman presents us with a grimy and visually unpleasant future in which everything resembles different eras of the past (the furniture looks like something out of an ’80s rec room, while people still listen to records). In the end, the film eschews the sci-fi stuff all together and becomes a love story (!) – a ridiculous turn of events that doesn’t work in the slightest, primarily because we couldn’t care less whether or not any of these characters find happiness.

*1/2 out of ****