Not since Babe: Pig in the City has an animated fable about animals put me through the emotional wringer like this. I swear I'll never stop hearing that cat's plaintive mews. But Flow is a very different beast from Miller's big-budget dark comedy. For one thing, it took Gints Zilbalodis and a small team (usually 3–5 people at a time) over five years to make.
The animation, made in open-source software that the filmmakers were learning as they went along,…
Great acting and cinematography can't obscure Haneke's facile finger-wagging and mystification.
Episodic, slice-of-life comedy of teenage anguish and middle-aged desperation, which also finds room for a few political jabs. The story centres on a young woman's explorations of love and its fraught emotional consequences, examining agency and alienation through a handful of verité setups and some improvised dialogue. In his book Film as a Subversive Art (1974), Amos Vogel writes: "Forman reintroduced the humanistic element into its cinema, exposing the viewer (in Chaplinesque alternations of laughter and held-in tears) to the sweetness and awkwardness of adolescence."
Spookily atmospheric TV movie with a familiar, Twilight Zone-ish premise (young people + old building + supernatural shenanigans) and the usual beats but some original ideas and genuine surprises up its sleeve. Efficient storytelling and fun effects and camerawork keep things interesting when the script feels strained. Any film with weird creatures is going to hinge to a degree on how credible those creatures are, and these are more effective and mysterious than I'd have expected – though my expectations, admittedly, were low.
