User Reviews

There is absolutely no plot in this movie!

Being an Icelander I can't understand why they were always looking for water? It's like two people searching for sand in the Sahara desert.

I get it would be emotionally hard to be the only two people left on this island. And it's cool to explore that but you gotta give me more then just two people talking about water and being depressed.

They should have moved to a farm next to a lake, not some mediocre house in the city. And the end was so strange always cutting to this water machine thing scene at the house and it didn't lead to anywhere.

And HOW was this icelandic fisherman so thirsty? like I said there's water everywhere. He should know that. And why didn't they just sail home since she was so homesick?

I wish they would have brought some plot twist. I really like the concept.

I must start this short review with a disclaimer.

I love "end of the world" movies. I also love movies about "solitude", or take place in an environment of extreme "solitude".

These kinds of movies automatically contain endless possibilities for interesting, fascinating situations and behavior.

In this movie, two American tourists wake up one morning while on vacation in Iceland. They find no humans in their motel... or on the street... or in any of the shops... or on any roads. None. No dead bodies, just no humans anywhere. When they check the internet, they notice that no messages on forums or news stories exist after about 3:30am (their time).

At this point, I'm rubbing my hands together because this kind of setup inherently has endless fabulous questions to answer and possibilities. What happened? Where did all the human bodies go? What will they decide to do? Stay in Iceland? Try to find a way to get back to north America? Do they go to a radio or TV station and broadcast a message (continuously on a loop) asking anyone remaining to call them? No. That would make sense (if they want to find other humans).

All they do is wander around looking for other humans for a few days.

Then they do a bit of relaxing and driving around (like on vacation).

The couple are MORONS.

But they are geniuses compared to the screenplay writers! Nothing happens in this movie. They just wander around and repeat endlessly "I don't know what to do".

Almost at the end of the movie, when they go way out into the countryside to relax in a cabin on a lake, they encounter an old man who is still alive... barely.

Why is he barely alive? Who knows. They imply he is dying of thirst, but... give us a break! His home is literally 30 feet from a fresh water lake (and certainly has his own water well, since he is far out in the countryside).

So they give him some water.

A few hours later, he dies.

No reason is given, and in fact it is obvious that no reason exists for him to be sick or ready to die.

There was zero point in finding him... except to make the conclusion of the story INFINITELY STUPID.

Yes. The only real problem the couple has is... the girl is home sick. Never mind that nobody is alive back at home, so there is literally no point in going home anyway.

So the ONLY significance of the old guy they found was... what? It was to show them that OTHER LIVING HUMANS PROBABLY EXIST SOMEWHERE.

And so, what happens next? Does the girl get happy, excited, encouraged that other humans are alive and they can find them? NO.

She kills herself because she is lonely! Just after they find that at least a few other humans exist in the world.

STUPID. STUPID. STUPID. STUPID. STUPID.

She and her boyfriend had a great life. Everything in the world, including all luxury, was theirs to enjoy. And they were in Iceland where geothermal will keep the electricity running without attention for hundreds of years. And even if that didn't work, there were thousands of generators and thousands of gas stations with fuel to power them all over the island.

They had a great life... and she killed herself.

Then... what does the boyfriend do? He just drives away with a glum look on his face while all the credits rolled.

I mean... HOW STUPID.

Sure, he should be sad his moron girlfriend offed herself.

But... they can't just end the movie this way, right? After all, they just discovered there are more humans out there to find.

So please... at least have a twilight zone ending of some kind, right? I mean, maybe he doses off at the wheel then wakes up in bed and finds it was all a dream. Yeah, very lame, but better than NOTHING.

Or maybe all of a sudden all the other humans re-appear... maybe even driving on the road he is driving at the end. But no.

The credits end... the movie ends... that's it.

This really has to be one of the dumbest movies ever made. They could have done endless interesting, fascinating things with the setup in the first 15 minutes of the movie. But they did nothing.

TERRIBLE. 1 out of 10 stars.

I understand the approach that was taken in this film, visually its beautiful. I understand how the characters evolve as they do and the direction that you are taken on.

Unfortunately what happens is the obvious; the picturesqueness of the scenery becomes his focal point. He sees everything as a perfect picture and is unwilling to fight for survival. Her inability to deal with his blindness becomes her prison. Neither know how to really fight to survive, both give up before they discover they are really alone and what being alone really means.

To be fair if I were trapped in Iceland and woke up one day the last person on Earth what would I do? I would get a boat and sail to Europe. I would drive to southern France or Italy and spend the rest of my days on the Mediterranean (or go who knows where else). To give up so easily and be carefree while doing it - its depressing and so anti- apocalyptic that its almost unforgivable. Depressing not in the sense that being alone is depressing - but depressing as the writer didn't have the sense on how much things mean anything in the end and that survival can be enough.

If you are alone - and I mean THAT alone - your objectives should be EXTREMELY clear. You must get and maintain: shelter, supplies, and safety. To get sick is to die. To get hurt is to die. To go hungry, cold, trapped, or any other foreseeable thing means you are dead. Love to hate this - hate to love it.

Big flash of light in the sky. Next morning no ones is left. The girl gives up and the guy drives away. The End. There, I just saved you a lot of wasted time! Now go watch something that makes sense!

...but a fairly good character study. Slow burn movies are only terrible if they aren't accomplishing anything. "Bokeh" accomplishes exactly what it set out to do -- examine the nature of humanity and human relationships as crystallized by the unlikely tableaux of (most of_ humanity seemingly disappearing and two characters stuck far from home. The movie, and the actors, did an excellent job of it. We all have different thresholds for boredom, granted, but I didn't find it boring in the least, perhaps because I was careful to get an idea of what the movie was about beforehand and therefore never expected it to be an action movie. It did come across as a blatant Icelandic travelogue, which is a bit annoying, but at least Iceland had some really nice vistas.

That said, I did find the ending a bit cheap. While there were hints of loneliness and nihilism toward the end of the movie, there was no indication that Jenai was outright suicidal after just a few weeks of isolation. Riley's incredibly stupid notification -- how could anyone be so dumb as to not realize how it would get Jenai's hopes up? -- seemed like a good reason to dump him, but driving her to suicide wasn't an act that was sufficiently foreshadowed. One short conversation with a depressed old ex-fisherman doesn't come close to selling the idea that Jenai was subsequently full-out suicidal. It was a very depressing, very human ending, to be sure, but I don't think the filmmakers earned that conclusion.

Incidentally, my theory about everyone disappearing is that they just went into hiding to keep away from the pretentious hipster Riley. The old man thought he was safe but, nope, Riley shows up on his remote doorstep. You could see the shock and horror in his reaction to seeing that pretentious hipster, and his decision to quit this life that very night made sense. It's just disappointing that it took Jenai, who seemed intelligent, so long to seek out her own means of escaping him. Tragic, in fact. Had she just decided to find a boat and fled, she'd have lived a long and happy life.

(It did strike me as a significant error that they didn't try to find one and learn to pilot it in the safety of the nearby waters before setting out. Boats aren't hard to steer if you rely on the engine rather than the sails, and fairly safe to practice with until you master it. Just find some yacht, head south for a while, then turn west to reach North America, since that's where they were from.)

You watch this film hoping for some twist at the end or anything to make watching this movie worth while, but there isn't. There's no point to this movie. I felt like I wasted my time watching this. This had the potential to be a good story (what would you do if everyone disappeared? why would everybody disappear?). None of these questions are answered in a meaningful way.

This director has nothing to say, no message to take out...why was this movie created at all? Boring, grey no purpose, no direction, waste of time. It's not even meditative because it's not realistic enough for a disaster situation. Two young people share their boredom together then one suicides due to boredom. What a loser director...

Don't read if you don't want to know the ending. But don't worry, it's just as boring as the rest. Nothing really happens. Other than a couple finding out that they are the last people on earth. Seems like that revelation should pick up the pace. Nope. They fight over yogurt. Go sight seeing. Take pictures. Ride around on a cart in the grocery store. Try on clothes. Make lattes. The description of this movie made it sound like it had action - don't be fooled. They only thing they were fighting to survive was boredom. I wasn't overly invested in the characters, which turned out to be a good thing, as I was more annoyed than sad when the girl killed herself. The man then proceeded to fall all over her in the mud trying to carry her, and then, after all that, just leaves her behind and drives off. I hear you buddy, I don't really care about her either. In the end he is (maybe) the last person on earth. There may be more people, but why clue us in? Why bother to give this mess a plot? It wasn't really even that artfully done, so there wasn't anything I even enjoyed to make up for all the rest. No, wait, I'll end on a good note, unlike this movie. The scenery was pretty. I think I would like to visit Iceland.

I am writing this review mainly to answer the two mistaken "Goofs" mentioned in the description. First of all it asks , how did Jenai get Rileys photos developed in an empty town...?? Well this person pays little attention to say that, because it shows you quite clearly in a scene near the end , that Jenai (wearing a red hoodie) finds and enters a 'Fotografi' shop! Secondly, Nils is dying of thirst and starvation in a Cabin by a lake... because he chose to! He clearly says in answer to Rileys question about what was he doing , "I made my bed". Meaning that he chose to lie down & die when the people didn't come back. This upset Riley and he shouts that, "you can't just give up!" So those were not goofs or plot holes at all.

This was a beautiful film about what it means to each of us individually to be alive. The meaning of life literally, and what makes sense to each one of us personally when confronted with such a reality . Riley was able to conceive of a life with Jenai and saw unlimited possibilities arpund him, Jenai needed a deeper meaning , a spiritual connection and reason for being. She couldn't conceive or accept being so alone. Nils had accepted long ago that we are all alone on our lifes journey , and he took what connection and meaning life gave him, staying in a disconnected relationship even with a wife who "was no longer the woman he had known before" and " living in a home where he didn't belong" He chose to spend his life working away a lot at sea fishing , but still he chose to give up living in a world without his family or human connection. Riley has hope and the spirit needed for a brave new world. He has everything he needs to survive even without Jenai , as we see him leave her there and go in the last scene. I enjoyed this film , but I can understand why people wouldn't .

It would appear that the Icelandic tourism board has run out of conventional means of attracting visitors and has resorted to some sort of reverse psychology.

A man and woman from the US visiting Iceland wake up to discover they are the only people left on Earth - or at least that's what they surmise from walking down the street and checking their email inbox. The woman, being religious, concludes that their predicament is the result of divine retribution. The man, being irreligious, is totally unaffected by the loss of his family, friends, or anyone else because you know... irreligious people don't have moral compasses.

The woman expresses some interest in returning home to the US but they scrap that idea because boats are hard to drive. Instead, they decide that the best course of action will be to visit all of Iceland's best tourist destinations and take lots of pictures. Once they get tired of all that, they return to Reykjavik where the man decides to spend his time building some sort of contraption for transporting water from the spring flowing through their backyard to the kitchen sink which appears to be about 10 feet away.

The man, knowing his girlfriend is going through some sort of existential crisis, decides to send her a picture of the miserable Icelandic winter they will soon have to endure. She is so depressed by the prospect that she decides to take her own life. The man searches the entire island of Iceland before finding his girlfriend's body. The movie ends with the man driving down the road distraught and contemplating his situation.

I forgot to mention that somewhere in there they meet an old man... but he's not that important to the plot so he only lives just long enough to deliver some aphorisms about God and the nature of reality.

What was the point of all this? Well, it's about living a life with meaning and... Oh wait, there is no point. Bokeh is just a high budget advertisement for vacationing in Iceland with a pretentious ending that confuses allegory with vagary. The acting is horrendous, the plot is non-existent, and 99% of the shots appear to have been taken straight out of a tourism pamphlet.

I have seen some interesting cinematic and literary iterations of the "wake up as the last person on Earth" plot structure, but this is first time I've seen it reincarnated as a tourism advertisement. The fact that this movie tries to pass itself off as some sort of existential art film is simply insulting.

Bokeh starts with a young couple, Jenai (The Guest's Maika Monroe) and Riley (Matt O'Leary), on vacation in Iceland, where they make out under waterfalls, soak in hot springs, and drink in the scenery on walking tours. Then, just a few minutes into the film, a mysterious green light pulses in the night sky, and Jenai and Riley wake up to discover that everyone else is gone, and they're alone in Reykjavik. apocalypse stories let us revel in the idea of replacing all the burdens of modern society with simpler, more visceral problems, like avoiding zombie bites or fighting off road-warrior gangs. But most apocalypses keep the survivors pretty busy. There's some powerful emotional impact in the idea that this extreme situation pushes them both to their own extremes, stripping away their personalities until they each reach a basic level. But in practice, since they come from such a tabular rasa starting point, it's hard to track whether Riley and Jenai are really changing as people.It's not important why everyone disappeared; what's important is which emotions the characters foreground for themselves, as they embrace their new circumstances. There's a lot of fantasy in the usual end-of-the-world scenarios, but there's a lot of horror there as well. Bokeh asks which of those reactions is more appropriate, and how they both play out. It's a gentle story, as apocalypses go, but even without monsters, it becomes a painful, emotional question of strength and survival.

I really liked this movie. It was a bit boring at times and a little too "quiet" but I see why. I really wish Jenai had given it more of a chance simply for Riley's sake. What she did to him was unforgivable! He tried so hard to make things better where she didn't connect with him and share her feelings enough.

One thing I really didn't like about the movie was they didn't explain where the pets went. I assumed they all went with the people until I saw a cat in the street.

If I was them I would have tried to learn to drive a boat and get to the UK because there had to be more people in a bigger place.

My only question was, what was in the email she read towards the end. I couldn't read it fast enough to see what was so devastating to her.

All in all I liked it because it made me wonder what I would do in that situation...for days!!

The story is not dull at all. This movie aims to hit your emotions and is cerebral. It doesn't rely on gimmicks. The major issue driving the plot is the fact that the boyfriend totally ignores all the signals that his partner is not happy at all. He gets caught up with all the material things that he can now own because no one else is alive. This causes him ignore the most important thing in his life, her. She commits suicide at the end. What could be more tragic than the person you love who also happens to be the only other person in the world killing themselves and leaving you to live alone.

It is beautiful in scenery and music. But... It lacks so much in human intellect and a fight for survival and does not address the human need to question and find answers. If it addresses this at all is with the suicide of the woman. The man just seems to want to act like nothing is that big of deal. That there is nothing they can do about the situation so they should just get on with enjoying their lives. Maybe if he spent time being more proactive trying to find answers then maybe the woman would have not become so depressed and killed herself. Most humans would have gone looking around at government facilities like the police or the embassies. Most people would try to get home. If you can not fly you can take a boat. Most people would arm themselves. They would keep searching for answers and try to get home. Again the scenery and music were beautiful but it just lacks human intelligence and just leaves you thinking the two characters are really stupid and dense and lack any passion for existence.

One of the best choices the creators of this film made, was selecting Iceland for the location of their story. Iceland as a majestic country, offers a lot to this film, it is the main source of its power and attractiveness, thanks to the breathtaking landscapes and photography that keep the spectator posted and curious for what comes ahead.

Their..."Bokeh" though is not so successful as for the rest of the film's parts, and photography is not even close enough to making this film go as it should. It seems that there is something missing somewhere in between, something that was essential for the story to be continuous and structural. That awkward emptiness no matter how scary it is, how mysterious and appealing to a sci-fi film, it doesn't seem to convince of its cause and purpose. It is possible that this may be a reflection of the protagonists love story, the void that is there between them, initially unseen by both of them, but later on becomes a realization for her, that doubts, questions and seeks return to her home; her escape, or a form of cowardice? As for him...he keeps on living in his dream world.

So, in the end it felt more like a failed love story, that even in the absence of people, this relationship couldn't be saved. None of both parts wanted to struggle, to truly fight for both of them and that lack of will for salvation passed to our own hearts and minds leaving us alone as well, wondering and wandering.