If the actors are going to spend the whole movie pontificating about reality and religion, they’d better learn to pronounce their words more clearly.
Funny Games does a much better job of conveying this movie’s messages without filling the runtime with unnecessary nonsense. I get that this was supposed to be “meta” and that the various horror tropes were repeated ad nauseam intentionally, but at a certain point, we don’t need to see them again. And it doesn’t help that the…
The fact that it invented various slasher tropes doesn’t make it good, especially considering how pointless those tropes are. There’s no pacing, the acting is stiff, none of the characters have any personality (aside from one, and she’s barely in it), and the plot aimlessly meanders for most of the runtime. The sound design is neat at times, and certain scenes have a genuinely creepy atmosphere, but it just doesn’t have the structure needed to tie it all together.
It was fine until the last half hour. Maybe some people like enduring 33 minutes of girl #2 screaming and running away, but to me it was just a pointless waste of time. There is something to be said for the experimental filming techniques, the messages about vegetarianism, and the overall tone of hopelessness. However, considering that well over half of this movie is either exposition or barely-established characters running away from chainsaw man, I can’t help but see this…
I wished that the characters in this were capable of saying something other than pseudo-philosophical word salads. They just ramble incoherently for several minutes about free will or evil and then attribute it to some respected philosopher or writer, as though the incoherence is made any more meaningful by saying that it came from some smart guy. The whole thing has as much depth as the thoughts of a 14-year-old who just learned what existentialism is and now won’t shut up about it.
