Popular reviews

• 

  Review by HarveyG 1

  Monotony of pain - but also an exploitation of children's suffering, for there's only one shot of laughter, few shots of relative calmness, and a plethora of yelling, barking, rocking, swaying and other more or less involuntary, mechanic, quite aggressive body movements. Sounds are overlapped as to create a feeling of dread.
  But we don't really know if the titular loneliness is there for real or only in the filmmakers' creation, because there's no personnel to help those children and I do believe that psychiatric care for autistic children in Belgium/France in the late 80's wasn't no Willowbrook or Pennhurst from the 60's.
  As it is, I don't think Seuls humanizes its subjects more than medical films of the first decades of 20th century. "They suffer alone" is not an adequate finding of a documentarian, especially when they don't event try to understand why are they alone, if they indeed are.

• 

  Review by christian ★★

  exploitative film on mentally ill and developmentally challenged children that seems to serve no real purpose besides going “look! look at these suffering children! isn’t their behavior absolutely shocking and weird? look at me who so clearly deeply cares about how badly they’re suffering that i do nothing at all except film them in their most vulnerable moments!”

• 

  Review by Shawn Clarke ★★

  There was something mildly exploitative about this. We view a hand full of children in a psychiatric institute, their scenes are edited in snippets, no dialogue, mostly focusing on their repetitive movements. I'm not sure what the point of this is, exactly. The film never tells us what's wrong with the children, but from the synopsis, they appear to be autistic. Without presenting that sort of information, you can't argue that this is a way to put focus on the disease... so what then?

  These kids probably deserved better.

• 

  Review by zzilmyvzhovb

  Have watched a handful of times by now; never gets easier, or less uncomfortable. 'What does watching it do for you?'—why is that the question, never, 'What does not watching it do for you?' Is it so reassuring to observe people play-acting normal, children or otherwise? What social malady makes us prefer images of subjects who manage to keep their pain politely hidden from view; what compulsive need to shield one's eyes from those who cannot but wear their true suffering on their proverbial sleeves (to say absolutely nothing of ornamental freaks, cosplaying derangement). Perhaps it depresses us to witness these dysregulated, untamed youth experience the liberating & violent pleasure of their world outside the guardrails of utilitarian positivism? Does it…