Diener der Dunkelheit

Certainly not bad. I was captivated throughout the movie. But I just didn't get it, yet I got a proper education. Maybe there is some high brow meta explanation that the story itself is a labyrinth? Maybe it is about the psyche of people that experience a trauma and make up an imaginary reality? I don't know where they were going with this as I did not get why half the movie was in Italian and the other part in English.

Seems logical for the most part, but at the end some twists makes it very confusing to fully understand... You have to think afterwards to try to figure it out, I think that this problem occurs when tou want to squeeze in 2 hrs a complex book.

In another 10/10 review you can read that bad reviews are ' from people who fell asleep or didn't understand', a thiller that makes you sleep or completely confused isn't what I call a good one.

Good film, very atmospheric, some great scenes. Could have been better. Lead actress was absolutely terrible performance.

But with puzzling bits and pieces as though sections have been edited-for example: the origin of the relationship between a prostitute and a criminal tracker, with references to a girl, known to both, who he couldn't save. Later, the killer being tracked deduces both the man who is hunting him and also his relationship with the prostitute...to lure him off of the trail, in an elaborate and improbable ruse that the killer appears to survive only by luck and the tracker's grace.

Dustin Hoffman, despite reports that he is losing his memory, manages to turn in a typically gifted performance. Not the man's first day on the job, even if he is making Russian-produced movies now. He doesn't disappoint. There are several other interesting performances as well as some that are pure schlock.

The design is also uneven, with an inspired division of cold case child abductions, aptly named "Limbo" and some sets that are practically out of an amusement park's haunted house. The style of story-telling itself, switches genre several times; a rocky journey between dream-like, heightened sequences that were not literal and those which appeared intended to be.

As a result, the general feeling is one of a pastiche of tropes used in other, better, movies.

Despite all of my criticism, the film was engaging and clever when it wasn't lost and ham-fisted. I liked that it was told simply, with mostly interior shots...landscape was saved for moments of impact, instead of thrown away in the type of lazy spoon-fed narrative this movie shares nothing in common with.

A scholar of Dante's work will surely draw more parallels than I did-this was written by an Italian author and set in Italy. I caught only very obvious references, such as a map of the maze comprising (I am pretty sure) the right number of levels to make the dungeon Hell.

Worth a look. Better than a lot out there.

This movie is a bit underrated at 5.6 stars at this moment. The acting is very good from top to bottom. As others have noted it's also an entertaining callback to 70s Italian giallo cinema, both in terms of the lurid, convoluted plot and the self-consciously stylized, artistic visual design.

Similar to some of those classic '70s flicks, at the end of the day the plot within a plot, story within a story of this movie doesn't make complete sense. If you examine it with cold-hearted logic logic you'd have to apply some significant contortions to fill the plot holes and get it to all work out. But also at the end of the day I'm not sure this lack of complete internal logic can really be seen as a flaw since it is a pretty traditional, even defining, feature of this kind of movie.

Bottom line, this is an entertaining movie filled with good acting, a beautiful to look at visual style, consistent suspense, and a pervasive sense of mystery.