The gore will put butts in seats, but the quiet, realistic scenes - like when Elisabeth, getting ready for a date, sees Sue’s poster and keeps going back to reapply her makeup out of insecurity - are the best part of this script.
Also, this is the most Demi Moore project ever. If we could tell Moore circa 1997 that she had this project to look forward to in her future, she’d have been ecstatic.
Might have been smarter to take a page from 60s int’l anthologies and collect films from 3 different directors.
Here’s a lineup: Lanthimos, Ruben Östlund, Bong Joon Ho.
The Best Years of Our Lives handled this subject much better, but this is a consistently interesting, humane and patient movie about vets returning from WWII and dealing with the shock of reintegration.
After an opening burst of energy, this otherwise somber, sedate story is about a family struggling to come to terms with the possible demise of an A.I. has few plot threads and only resolves some of those. (How their daughter will cope seems the most urgent question, one that is urgently raised but remains under-explored.) There is some half-hearted metaphoric comparison of A.I.s to smartphones, esp. the possibility of their being used to track and spy on us, but this…
