Accident is mesmerizing. Floating through the details of an appropriately Pinter-esque life, we are given a kind of psychological portrait in which we learn little more than what we can visually observe.
The most emblematic scene in the movie shows two people standing with their backs to us, leaning against a fence. One of them, just before the cut, breaks a twig from of the branch above him with a swift, almost violent motion. The movie itself keeps its back to us, refusing to yield its secrets while occasionally holding out before us strangely telling details.
The quiet narrative is punctuated by shots of cold, precise symbolic weight. Although they do not generally interrupt the pace, or shock us, they have a feeling of violence to them; shots of a house, tracking in extremely slowly until we hear the sound of a terrible car crash, or in which the camera moves, in close-up, between stone gargoyles to the beat of a cathedral bell hint at the ugliness behind the veneer of the character's lives. If nothing else, Accident is triumphant in its ability to convey a sense of existential rot that is somehow simultaneously hidden and apparent.
The most emblematic scene in the movie shows two people standing with their backs to us, leaning against a fence. One of them, just before the cut, breaks a twig from of the branch above him with a swift, almost violent motion. The movie itself keeps its back to us, refusing to yield its secrets while occasionally holding out before us strangely telling details.
The quiet narrative is punctuated by shots of cold, precise symbolic weight. Although they do not generally interrupt the pace, or shock us, they have a feeling of violence to them; shots of a house, tracking in extremely slowly until we hear the sound of a terrible car crash, or in which the camera moves, in close-up, between stone gargoyles to the beat of a cathedral bell hint at the ugliness behind the veneer of the character's lives. If nothing else, Accident is triumphant in its ability to convey a sense of existential rot that is somehow simultaneously hidden and apparent.