Reviews

A middle aged writer rescues a young woman from drowning near the shores of South Africa. Although he is much older, they fall in love right there and then and soon some obvious complications ensue. There is hardly a likable or interesting character in this wandering historical drama about the poet Ingrid Jonker (Carice van Houten). It deals primarily with the mentally troubled writer and her precarious relationships with men, including her father (Rutger Hauer) who is a member of the apartheid regime she strongly opposes.

The film never picks up any speed and the absence of a discernible plot line or a compelling narrative makes for a very pallid viewing experience. Hauers script is particularly one-note but the same could be said of van Houten who seemed to be out of her depth in the role of a frustrated and depressed young woman trying to get her voice heard through rebellious poetry. Liam Cunningham fares a lot better as one of the two love interests and produces the only sympathetic character of the film.

Let the right one in, critically acclaimed, is a Swedish Indie-like coming of age story with a vampire thread thrown in for good measure. During its runtime, which felt like it was going for a new world record, we see the excruciatingly slow developing relationship between Oscar, a 12 year old bullied schoolboy and Eli, a much older Vampire who very convincingly passes as a 12 year old herself.

Though the premise is original, which at least should entertain a shade of interest, the whole movie is set up to be more of a painting than an actual film. What little plot they undertook to be screened not only got lost in the superabundance of superfluous scenes, it also drowned in an overall feeling of lifelessness. I got the impression that this was intentional although it boggles the mind what they felt was so interesting about the story arc that the movie could get away with the glaring lack of suspense, momentum or indeed, any respect for logic.

This brings me to my main complaint, which is that nothing in the story really made much sense to me. People are hung from trees to capture their blood, brutal killings take place in plain sight in the streets galore, but I didn't get the impression anyone in the movie really cared about it. No police is informed, no investigation is started. Although I can imagine why the storyteller tried to follow a different path, the absurdity of it was so glaring; you'd think there was some hidden point to it. But there isn't. It's just plain weird and annoyingly so.

Another issue I take with the film is the acting/portrayal of the unsympathetic and uninvolved characters. No one acts according to the laws of human behavior; it's like watching a parody of something I'm not aware even existed.

Right in the beginning of the movie we see the character Oscar mimicking the stabbing of one of his school chums. He uses a tree for inspiration and mutters the words "scream, scream you pig!". The way he spoke these words raised a couple of eyebrows with me, and the brows didn't seem comfortable to settle back down during the course of the film. I'm sorry, but no one talks or acts like that. The boy either simply can't act or was instructed to behave like an autistic buffoon with an IQ to match his shoe size while saliva continuously drools from his mouth. Most of the other dim characters in the movie fare even worse and I think it's sadistic to expose an intelligent audience to this sort of nonsense.

For a full length future film, this movie simply lacks plot, scenario and a sense of direction. I'm still completely unsure what the filmmakers set out to create here. As a coming of age type of film, nothing really was added to the vast legacy this theme already laid down for us to enjoy in numerous books and films. As a vampire movie, it just lacks everything that makes those movies enjoyable to those that are into that genre; namely suspense and humor(?). And as a slow moving Indie movie it really lacks art. The endless showing of dimly lit streets or droplets from a tap forced down by Newtonian law, while being accompanied by abstruse orchestral overtures, shouldn't be a point in itself. And neither should the deliberate lack of conversation be, nor its replacement: long tedious shots of facial expressions that try really very hard to express nothing at all.

In short, this film is a dud. Like a bomb that doesn't go off, it just lies in the ground after a forgotten war to harmlessly corrode away into oblivion. A seemingly endless string of mind-numbing scenes built on an almost non existing plot line where suspense is replaced by predictability and out of place absurdism.

3/10

It's astonishing to see how ghastly efficient the propaganda machine of the movie business operates these days. I can't wait to read the first post doctorates on the study of how the whole world was manipulated into wholeheartedly believe that this atrociously saccharine Bollywood snoozer is worth even a single nomination, aside from a couple of razzies that is.

Watching this pathetic excuse for entertainment being drowned in acclaim, it made me wonder how all those professional movie critics somehow managed to forget the vast legacy of western cinema before they almost unanimously crawled up the arse of one D. Boyle and his snotty little film.

You can almost forgive them, but then you realize that it's actually their job to tell you what I'm telling you now. The Academy Awards have turned into a Schmaltzolympics by favoring this sort of totally unimpressive and manipulative dross we all look down on the rest of the year. And people are sheep. But what else is new.

Bah!