WHAT WE THINK:
OUR SCORE:
– Somewhat interesting, albeit forgettable.
JUST A FEW WORDS (IN THE HEAT OF THE MOMENT):
As someone else rightly pointed out this feels like an extremely dilated The Twilight Zone episode. This film works on a certain dose of surrealism that unfortunately succumbs to its own concept.
Once the central problem is issued and the metaphorization (extremely simplistic) of the “suburban” life has been established – a man who kills himself with work, a woman raising a child, marital crises, solitude in an unknown place, the primary scene (the child who sees the parents having sex), the discovery that it all happened other times before (the corpse in the hole), the child who grows too fast (to the eyes of the “parents”) until he is an adult and, selfishly (maybe slightly different in non anglo-saxon societies), he no longer cares about the “parents” and the mother who does not recognize him – the film revolves around itself and the concept becoming a bit too “descriptive”.
In short, the battle for survival (the sequence of the newborn birds – the strongest win against the weaker who instead dies) and the “new” that must necessarily take over the “old” (the replacement of the old Martin with a new one) becomes quite cloying considering the narrative form chosen to tell this story. In fact, this is not organized with an interesting evolution that could lead the film out of the feeling of a tired and lazy repetition of events, and neither through means that could have found a wider and symbolically more attractive turn, leaving behind the weight of the surreal tone adopted.
Our rating of this film reflects, although we didn’t really like it, the pleasure for a slightly more experimental attempt (which is only found on the narrative level and less on the visual one, unfortunately) than the average film coming out these days.
PROS:
- Quite bad VFS that as a paradox make the fake world even more creepy.
- The pastel colour palette heightens the estranging feeling.
- Concept and tone are interesting.
- Imogen Poots (her acting, although a bit over the top in some places, is a strong point for us).
- Casting (they found some incredible faces!)
CONS:
- This film shrinks itself on an interesting concept and doesn’t evolve.
- The “critique” that we read between the lines is too simplistic and maybe the surreal narrative chosen to tell the story is “philosophically” too ambitious in comparison with the text itself: just like as if for a quite simple theme I’d choose an overtly ambitious dress just to make it more interesting and not because necessary to what I mean to say.
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GENERAL INFO:
5.8
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