A film which delicately balances its subtleties and its un-subtleties until finally resolving into a bit of a conspiracy theorist's wet dream, in a Mr Robot for grown ups kind of way.
Watching it, I was under the impression that it was an original piece of content from Sam Esmail...until today my cousin contacted me to recommend the novel by Rumaan Alam.
So although the movie did not seem to quite live up to the promise of its first couple of acts, it's the underlying premise which has piqued my interest sufficiently to have a go at the book.
One more spoiler, and it's a big one, though rather culturally-specific: the African American father and daughter who turn up at the door late at night are not in fact going to turn out like the two boys in Michael Hanneke's Funny Games (though God knows, holidaymakers Amanda and Clay would seem to deserve it.)
To most English speakers this will be absolutely obvious from the outset.
For just as Davros has been stripped of his half-dalek hover base because the BBC has woken to realisation that people in 'wheelchairs' can never be evil, it has become a given in contemporary anglophone popular culture that black characters upon whom some suspicion has fallen can never turn out to be wrong uns.
Yet I can attest that Guatemalans have not absorbed these unspoken rules and so have a rather different experience of the 'unconscious bias' section of this story.
Perhaps because of some unconscious bias of their own, though not necessarily so, viewers here can genuinely worry that the motives of 'G' and Ruth might be nefarious, and so experience a level of dramatic tension in this mid-section of the movie that I completely missed out on.
By the time the this non-misunderstanding has been cleaned up, the movie starts to flail a bit, owing to a lack of genuine antagonism beyond the rather ludicrous symptoms of 'the event' (though I did enjoy the Tesla ad) and viewers find themselves depending on a sexual tension misfire within the stranded adult quartet, plus a bunch of deer and the long-delayed promise of Kevin Bacon to put them back on the edge of their seats, and sadly none of these really deliver as anticipated.
The Netflix budgets are clearly not quite big enough to make two or three really important shock moments nearly as realistic or jaw-dropping as they needed to be.
Yet alongside this comparative failure on the un-subtleties, it is the subtlety of all six central performances that I will remember, out of which I think Julia Roberts was the stand-out.
Esmail's screenplay has some spark's too.
No comments:
Post a Comment