Reviews

PARASITE: The new Bong Joon-ho film that may be the best he's made and a hopeful contender for the best of the year.

First of, the dialogue is brilliant. With it constantly working on multiple levels, first making you understand and care about these characters, then learning dribs and drabs of their schemes and finally subtly setting up dialogue which is then brilliantly reincorporated to fuel emotional powerhouses of performances within the explosive finale. This is all whilst it being incredible natural and just out right human, there are so many instances of character inflection which tell you so much about each and every person on screen. Especially when some of the characters later in the film are playing characters themselves, lines here and there are clearly said by either themselves or the character they're pretending to be and because of their fantastic set-up, you're able to immediately tell when they're being themselves or not on the turn of a dime.

It manages to always perfectly balance it's comedic elements with the serious mystery thriller ones, always knowing exactly when and how to incorporate the two into the lives of the characters to create an amount of emotional connectivity to a film I haven't experience all year.

The political satire and themes on class struggle are too, fascinating, they're intrinsically baked into the narrative and backstory of the characters without ever being in your face or obnoxiously telling you what to think, so when they are brought up for a narrative beat or for you to get an emotional read on someone, you're free to interpret and analyse them as much or as little as you want.

Joon-Ho has at some points made the political ideologies a bit too apparent in his films which has come across as almost lecturous in Okja (2017) and Snowpiercer (2013). Thankfully this has never been detrimental to the final product, but I think the political statements within Parasite are here to create a better emotional connection to these characters, rather than blatantly tell you about the political climate you already know about.

By making you care about all these different and unique characters and using the political themes to set the stage for the story, when the themes on class struggle come to a head within the narrative you for one actually care about them because they're affecting character's you understand and like, and secondly they're then far more interesting to delve into and think about because the film never asked you too.

Even if you were to purely watch this without wanting to think about social satire, it's still an unbelievable film. It takes you on a mysterious thrill ride with some of the most interesting and unique characters put to screen this decade, the story goes to places you would never dream it would, and the soundtrack will be stuck in your head for days after you see it. It's a mile a minute masterpiece from one of the most exceptional auteur directors working today and was more than worthy of taking the Palme d'Or - 10/10

OH MERCY! was easily the most inconsistent film I've seen all year.

It's description of 'A police chief in northern France tries to solve a case where an old woman was brutally murdered' starring Lea Seydoux sounds like a potential recipe for success, but none of the more interesting aspects of the film are focused on and instead what we get is a two hour long police procedural that doesn't seem to know what it wants to be.

The film goes from serious to almost comical at points, dealing with horrific crimes and then playing out good cop/bad cop scenes that are cartoonish to say the least. It's shooting style jumps from one to the next, one second it's all very shaky handheld, the next it's all very smooth tracking shots. Lastly the score seems to be taking pages from everywhere, with Dheepan and The Revenant being ones I heard almost copies of within the film. I call these inconsistencies because there's no point within the film that leads me to believe that these jumps in tone, shooting style or score are there for any artistic reason or to enhance the point of any scenes, it all just comes across as random.

The main issue I had with this film was it's pacing, the first half of the film is spent introducing characters and looking at half a dozen crimes which ultimately don't have anything to do with one another. Everything is played out incredibly seriously, there are some monologues from a new detective commenting on the way of the world these days, but because we're not given any information on the police officers working these cases it's nearly impossible to care about what's going on.

The second half is then spent looking at the murder in the synopsis. We see some characters being tracked down, clues are found and eventually an actual suspect is brought in, we see some brilliant performances in the interrogation scene and things pick up slightly, but after a quick confession I was left confused and then back to bored. The confession itself didn't seem to make much sense in the moment, which is partly the point, you're in a space of unknowing and left trying to figure out whether the culprit is covering for someone else, which is why the interrogation scene works so well. You're in the headspace of the police chief at that point, searching for any inconsistencies in their story and watching for any subtle hints of a lie, but when the rest of the film doesn't clue you in on really why the murderer did what they did, it all seems pointless.

We get trickles of information about the police chief, but throughout the entire film he seems happy and well adjusted with his job and life, and by the end of the film he hasn't changed in the slightest. As with the new detective, who I thought may have been scared slightly by the nature of the old woman's murder, but nothing has changed for him. Every character is incredibly two dimensional and it makes it very hard to care about what's going on at all.

I understand that this may have been the point of the film, I actually like the idea of having a police film look at everything these detectives have to go through, and the only real part of the story is just a drop in the bucket of what they have to deal with each week. It contextualises the struggles the police have to go through in an interesting way and looks at the impossible task it is to get out of the cycle of crime for the poor people in these cities. It's just a shame this idea wasn't better realised by letting us learn about these character's internally whilst they try and solve the mystery.

Check this one out if you're interested in seeing a great performance from Lea Seydoux and Roschdy Zem, but this one wasn't for me - 4/10

QUIEN TE CANTARA, the new film by Carlos Vermut was absolutely astonishing. Masterfully dealing with themes of identification, art's effect and merit, and the self.

Some gorgeous cinematography and music and an incredible performance by Eva Llorach. It felt like a mix of Persona and Black Swan in some instances, with Vermut having a perfect grasp on balancing the film's near horrific thriller scenes with its more abstract imagery.

They tie into eachother so well that I'm sure there's more I'll pick up on on further watches - 10/10

THE LIGHTHOUSE was the best film I've seen at Cannes so far, an incomparable hysterical nightmare epic with Pattinson potentially delivering the best performance of the year. It takes its time, digs deep under your subconscious and won't leave till you've picked apart every frame - 9/10

The Kid with the Bike (2011) directed by the Dardenne Brothers. This film follows a child finding out his biological father wants nothing to do with him and in doing so he's forced to relay on a foster parent. The emotional turmoil this child goes through is written relatively simply but the unfathomable depth of the film comes from his absolutely outstanding performance.

The staple cinematography of the Dardenne brothers consists largely of shots that take up entire scenes, which along with the natural colour pallet really help bring another huge layer of realism to the film. It not only allows the actors to go through a multitude of emotions without having to rev themselves up on each take, but with the heavy use of natural extras and exterior lighting it all results in one of the most realistic looking films I've ever seen, to the point of it almost feeling like a documentary in some instances.

The sparsely used yet orchestrally swelling music fits the film perfectly. Rather than taking up entire scenes or montaged sequences, it more or less book ends specific points to absolutely fantastic effect.

In the end you have a phenomenally well shot, beautifully acted drama looking at grief, loneliness and emotional desperation. It has one of the best child performances I've ever seen and is ultimately unmissable. Easily one of the best films of 2011. (9/10)