There are far too many reviews about this film that discuss the plot, acting, and directing in-depth for mine to add anything, so this is more of a comment about how this film affected me when I watched it many years ago.
This is one of the most difficult films I have ever watched. A slasher film marathon with in-your-face gore would be easier to sit through than this, because they don't affect you on a personal level like this film does. You can laugh off the blood and fake violence in a slasher flick, but there is nothing to laugh at in this film. It brings up disturbing feelings, hopelessness, claustrophobia, the feeling that no matter what you do, even if given a second chance at life, you are still trapped by the decisions you made in your first one, or will make the exact same choices you did in your first life, bringing you to the same point again. I hope the message of this film isn't "you're doomed to make the same mistakes and decisions over and over again no matter what you do, so don't even try". If there is a message in this film, or a statement it makes, it's "don't pretend your past didn't happen, and walk away from it, thinking you can start over with a new life and new lessons. Instead, embrace what happened to you, good and bad, and that you learned a lot from it, good and bad. Then go on with the rest of your life with those lessons that your life, including your mistakes, taught you". It's one thing to move to a new place and to a new career and even a new family; it's another to abandon everything you learned up to that point, which is your identity. That's the cautionary moral this movie seems to make.
At least, I hope it does. The movie is so bleak and so stark in its presentation, it leaves it entirely up to the audience whether there's a statement there at all.
I think this is just the kind of movie that Roger Ebert liked and would have recommended. I'd like to know what he thought of it.....
This is one of the most difficult films I have ever watched. A slasher film marathon with in-your-face gore would be easier to sit through than this, because they don't affect you on a personal level like this film does. You can laugh off the blood and fake violence in a slasher flick, but there is nothing to laugh at in this film. It brings up disturbing feelings, hopelessness, claustrophobia, the feeling that no matter what you do, even if given a second chance at life, you are still trapped by the decisions you made in your first one, or will make the exact same choices you did in your first life, bringing you to the same point again. I hope the message of this film isn't "you're doomed to make the same mistakes and decisions over and over again no matter what you do, so don't even try". If there is a message in this film, or a statement it makes, it's "don't pretend your past didn't happen, and walk away from it, thinking you can start over with a new life and new lessons. Instead, embrace what happened to you, good and bad, and that you learned a lot from it, good and bad. Then go on with the rest of your life with those lessons that your life, including your mistakes, taught you". It's one thing to move to a new place and to a new career and even a new family; it's another to abandon everything you learned up to that point, which is your identity. That's the cautionary moral this movie seems to make.
At least, I hope it does. The movie is so bleak and so stark in its presentation, it leaves it entirely up to the audience whether there's a statement there at all.
I think this is just the kind of movie that Roger Ebert liked and would have recommended. I'd like to know what he thought of it.....