Some spoilers:
Gleaning Thesis for profundity may carry the unhappy side consequence of making you look a little too closely at the content of what is essentially a sick little flick. And we wouldn't want that.
It's a chiller, plain and simple.
If you relate it more to the Euro tradition of Jess Franco and Dario Argento than that of Bergman or Bresson, you get the joke. The production is as sleek and seamless as any Hollywood film of the period. The bonus here is that there is a superbly accomplished atmosphere of immense dread throughout most of the film that mainstream films always seem to lack. There is a grime, a dark grubbiness that perfectly matches the minds of the films villains, real and apparent. Hitchcock would applaud the makers ability to stretch scary moments beyond real time and milk audience identification with his characters if nothing else.
The film goes astray, for me, in suggesting the heroine is close to being seduced at one point by the awful thrill of the violence she is investigating. (In a dream sequence, she kisses the hand of the man who has just cut her throat.) Ditto the scenes that show slack-jawed average citizens drawn to violence on TV. It rather too patly suggests that all you have to do is put unbearable violence out there, and all people (not just some) will be unable to resist its allure. These are cliches, a kind of pandering to those who are quick to bemoan how base human beings really are. They are NOT profound observations on human nature. Sorry.
Thesis keeps your interest. That is what a good thriller does. So it gets 6 stars from me. It loses a point or two for exploiting violence for our entertainment, then, at the close, self-righteously pointing a finger at us for being interested enough in the first place to sit through (and enjoy?) the very same. A fairly questionable enterprise, over all.
Gleaning Thesis for profundity may carry the unhappy side consequence of making you look a little too closely at the content of what is essentially a sick little flick. And we wouldn't want that.
It's a chiller, plain and simple.
If you relate it more to the Euro tradition of Jess Franco and Dario Argento than that of Bergman or Bresson, you get the joke. The production is as sleek and seamless as any Hollywood film of the period. The bonus here is that there is a superbly accomplished atmosphere of immense dread throughout most of the film that mainstream films always seem to lack. There is a grime, a dark grubbiness that perfectly matches the minds of the films villains, real and apparent. Hitchcock would applaud the makers ability to stretch scary moments beyond real time and milk audience identification with his characters if nothing else.
The film goes astray, for me, in suggesting the heroine is close to being seduced at one point by the awful thrill of the violence she is investigating. (In a dream sequence, she kisses the hand of the man who has just cut her throat.) Ditto the scenes that show slack-jawed average citizens drawn to violence on TV. It rather too patly suggests that all you have to do is put unbearable violence out there, and all people (not just some) will be unable to resist its allure. These are cliches, a kind of pandering to those who are quick to bemoan how base human beings really are. They are NOT profound observations on human nature. Sorry.
Thesis keeps your interest. That is what a good thriller does. So it gets 6 stars from me. It loses a point or two for exploiting violence for our entertainment, then, at the close, self-righteously pointing a finger at us for being interested enough in the first place to sit through (and enjoy?) the very same. A fairly questionable enterprise, over all.