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Reviews
L.O.L. Surprise: The Movie (2021)
A goddamn masterpiece
This should have been just a product-placing piece of fluff. It should have been cynical, insubstantial, just plain dumb. So how did it end up with this much depth, this much nuance? Who asked that it include an extended De Palma homage, a vaporwave western fashion showdown, an action-packed comic-book-styled chase scene, with the disparate aesthetics held together by a series of vaudevillean stop-motion sequences? Sure, it tells of a young girl's reckoning with change through an imaginative interaction with a world of product -- but, goddammit, kids already live in a world of product; that is precisely how they engage with and overcome trauma. Somehow this movie knows that, knows how to work with the premise, and finds an inner directorial freedom to represent that engagement in all its chaotic fluidity, utterly keen to the power of misdirection and surprise. It speaks from a rich visual language, refreshingly free of immersion-breaking winks and nods to the grown-ups in the room. Kudos to all involved.