A good (and depressing) movie if you want to sit and ponder the futility of everything, but not so great if you're just seeking a Saturday night scare-fest. That's a problem, because it's terribly mis-marketed - the cover and blurb pitch this as a slasher film when it's definitely not.
The film raises a philosophical question for viewers to chew on: does anything we do ever matter if everything we do will be forgotten almost as soon as we're gone? (One character even spells this out as he tries to leave a mark that can't be erased.) The horror here isn't a killer that can be defeated, a monster that can be escaped, or a conspiracy that can be unraveled and explained away, but the inevitable fact of death and our own eventual irrelevance, the fear of being erased by time. Like a post-modern danse macabre, each character acts a symbol (of evil, of family, of education, of religion, etc.), though it's disturbing to wonder if our sympathies would fall differently with a bit less B-movie scripting and a bit more A-list acting.
I didn't particularly mind the open ending or the lack of explanations, because the question the film is poking us to think about has no objective answer. I doubt any concrete explanation the film could have cooked up would have worked without undermining that central question and turning the film into the straightforward slasher the cover advertises.
The film raises a philosophical question for viewers to chew on: does anything we do ever matter if everything we do will be forgotten almost as soon as we're gone? (One character even spells this out as he tries to leave a mark that can't be erased.) The horror here isn't a killer that can be defeated, a monster that can be escaped, or a conspiracy that can be unraveled and explained away, but the inevitable fact of death and our own eventual irrelevance, the fear of being erased by time. Like a post-modern danse macabre, each character acts a symbol (of evil, of family, of education, of religion, etc.), though it's disturbing to wonder if our sympathies would fall differently with a bit less B-movie scripting and a bit more A-list acting.
I didn't particularly mind the open ending or the lack of explanations, because the question the film is poking us to think about has no objective answer. I doubt any concrete explanation the film could have cooked up would have worked without undermining that central question and turning the film into the straightforward slasher the cover advertises.