User Reviews

I do not think that, as one other reviewer here obviously does, this documentary is staged. Of course he has to "catch himself" at the beginning of a scene, whatever that means, as it is an extremely personal movie. One example that underlines the realness of the movie and the effort undertaken by all involved, in my opinion, is how the girlfriend is filmed only minimally. Tell me one reason why to do this if it were staged!? Also other aspects, that only make sense as a documentary. THIS FILM IS NOT STAGED. The director (and star) compiled this documentary out of many, many hours of material, after the experiment was finished(think of the grandmother), and it is well documented in newspaper articles and such that he really undertook this experiment (he became a semi-celebrity in his native country). If all that were fake, it seems just a little less effort than the real deal, and therefore I find it hard to believe that this isn't sincere. Don't believe the naysayer (singular, I am sure).

Generally speaking, this movie is a must-watch for people who love any kind of documentary and are interested how different mindsets navigate through our, let's face it, more and more materialistic world. It not only shows (doesn't tell) the viewer how the most important things can not be bought, which is something almost everyone knows, but still ignores in daily life, and also at the same time asserting the importance that things do, after all, have in our lives, as memorabilia, nostalgic things that are "useless" but we hold on to nevertheless, and so almost this documentary becomes an elegy for a kind of overlap of material and immaterial realms of humankind, likable to the overlap between the material vinyl record (nowadays nostalgic, because non-CD & non-digital) and the immaterial music, which then remains, connotation-like, as part of the silent-again record.

Because, as the poet Robert Duncan (1919-1988) once wrote so aptly:

When silence / Blooms in the house, all the paraphernalia of our existence / Shed the twitterings of value and reappear as heraldic devices.

What value has the life of a homeless man compared to the life of a millionaire? Surely the latter hast more "twitterings" of value in his mansion, but maybe, just maybe, the homeless will one day HAVE just what he needs, not more, nor less, and BE just what he wants to be, not less, whereas the millionaire more often than not can very well BE less than he wants to be, despite all his wealth-induced prestige. Therefore for further reading I (strongly) recommend:

• "To Have or to Be?" by the social psychologist ERICH FROMM, first published in 1976.

This movie, this EXPERIMENT, made more than a 35 years after Fromm's insights, represents nothing less than a psychological self-experiment with philosophical implications - and it is a very entertaining one, too.

It's easy to understand what this film is about early on - a man locks up all his stuff (which apparently is too much) and decides to only allow himself to take back 1 thing a day. Immediately it's difficult not to compare this to millions of people worldwide living rough on the streets - yet this guy doesn't have it rough, he still has it apartment, and after a few days more 'stuff' than any homeless person.

So this film is not about awareness of this problem in the world (though it should have been - or at least highlighted it). Instead it is more about a person trying to understand what is important to him. This, in a material sense, is only touched upon briefly as the larger part of the film loses focus on this and just concentrates on him and his life.

The film struggles to tell its message - and the whole purpose of the project because the spotlight is on the lead far too often. A missed opportunity to make a documentary about something insightful.

I really enjoyed watching this film, be it now a true doc or not. The experiment really happened and that's the only thing that matters. Being a minimalist myself, I can totally relate with the movie's core message and I find it wonderful that someone did dare to take up this subject and make it a the central theme in a film.

The film is a sweet, slow story with a good portion of self irony and many great insights. A must-watch for everybody who's attracted by minimalism but doesn't dare to live it. The soundtrack is nice and the camera work excellent. The film is itself a tribute to minimalism, because it tries to reduce the number of cuts and scenes to the bare necessary. This stands in wonderful contrast to what we are served from Hollyweird these days, where the frame frequency has increased tremendously in the last 20 years, the sound effects have become more dramatic, and constant action is the only premise. How refreshing to be able to just watch a scene or camera angle for more than a few seconds. A great piece of work!

If you're looking for a psychological & sociological reflection on the role useless things play in our western lives, this is not the film for you.

Synopsis: A guy has some mental problems after being left by a girlfriend. He feels empty and compensates by buying a lot of stuff for three years, until the stuff itself feels like a problem. Instead of going to therapy he decides to lock all the stuff up for a year to find out what really matters in life (spoiler: not stuff, but people & love). By the end of the year he still hasn't gone to therapy but has found a new girlfriend to sort out his problems for now.

A thoroughly annoying & self-centered film about a problem that is so obviously solvable that it doesn't even seem like a problem.

Three stars for good cinematography.

Fascinating 'reviews of the times' here, one review slates this documentary because it's obviously filmed by the guy himself. It's also obviously an amateur production ,made within limitations, what does this guy expect, Werner Herzog filming with hidden cameras?

And another review with a wonderfully narcissistic and unbelievably forced hot-take of this documentary as being bad because it doesn't talk about homelessness.What in incredibly dense point to attempt to make, this is a documentary about a student who goes through some bad breakup and then locks everything he owns up, and tries to live without the hoarded crap he's accumulated so far in his life. It has nothing to say about homelessness, and to try to connect them in order to virtue signal is hideously egotistical.

This documentary is great, the start is great, with the naked run across a freezing town to get the first item, it feels like a small labour of love. The take away is a valuable lesson, our hoarded items hold us back and keep us tied down. If Konmari is the Japanese Spa of minimalism, this story is the Finnish jump in a frozen lake version of that.

This is a great idea for either a movie (comedy) or a documentary but to me the problem is that the filmmaker/star/subject just can not seem to decide which one of those genres of movies he actually wants to make.

The way the camera is set up, the way he "catches himself" at the beginning of scenes, the way his (and he apparently has only one) camera is set up inside a room before others/he enter, and then perform in front of the camera pretending it is not there... these things all tell me that this is a movie, which maybe doesn't have a script but at the very least has an idea where this is going and what they need to do in each scene.

On the other hand it's clearly not just a scripted movie or at the very least is trying so hard to present itself as a straight up documentary, so it's not as funny or enjoyable as it could have been in that regard either.

Great effort and an amazing premise but they just didn't pull it off which is a shame. If they tried it again as a real documentary or as the premise of a movie I would watch that in a heartbeat!

I initially thought this was going to be really clever and interesting. Instead, incredibly slow, boring and pointless. There are so many unanswered questions. The guy puts EVERYTHING into a storage locker and allows himself to retrieve one item per day. Well ... if it were me, I'd get some toilet paper. How he wipes himself is not explained. Neither is how does he brush his teeth, bath, eat, drink, pay his bills, pay for his rent, etc. Etc. Etc. Sorry, but this was ill-conceived and not believable. That is, this is not real; just made up. Waste of time.

I don't even know or care how it ends, as I turned it off after wasting about 45 minutes waiting for something interesting. Instead, the movie became more ridiculous.