Chariot

A man retains a memory of an old life and cannot let it go. A doctor tries to figure out why the memory is persistent. The man continues his existence, unaware of his changed condition and trying to understand his new surroundings.

The story is told with dream logic. It paints mundane concepts on top of an unknowable in-between existence, and drops hints about the characters without telling too much. Is the man's bare room a reflection of who he was before? Is the woman's nicely decorated apartment a reflection of her previous existence?

The doctor's resolution to the man's problem is to burn the memories. He severs the man's ties to his old life, but the cycle continues anew in a different form.

This is one of the better movies I have seen this year and I look forward to more from the writer and director. The cast is also top-notch. The marketing team dropped the ball.

Apart from just a couple of interesting scenes or moments, the entire film is a very pale attempt at surrealist cinema.

Surrealist or avant-garde films are a cool genre. But the problem with many of them is that they just think up weird nonsensical things to put in for the sake of being weird and cool. But the best surrealist films or directors always have a core sensibility to them, a story, a moral, a deep meaning, a connectedness, and either a beauty or terror to it -- eg, "8 1/2" or "Mulholland Drive".

This film tho is just a try-hard sophomoric effort. And the audience sees right thru it, as all the reviewers here have demonstrated. They're not fooled by it's absence of purpose and meaning.

I consider myself as reasonably intelligent, but this movie went totally beyond me! Thanks to the titles of the various parts (chapters) I at least could gather that reincarnation should be the main theme, so somehow all the goings on had to be related to that. But to be honest, I nowhere in this movie came across even one single thing that seemed in any way to refer to reincarnation. When I force myself to look at it with a positive, or at least a well-meaning attitude, I could say that it's about dreams: either the psychological meaning of (recurrent) dreams, like forming a bridge to repressed memories from childhood; or even, in a more surrealistic way, comparing life itself to a dream. But reincarnation???

There are definitely interesting scenes, also visually, like the party where all these weird guests were gathered, or the masked woman singing on the rooftop, or the almost gothic scene of the surgical operation that took place in a deserted medieval tower. But unfortunately there were many more totally unfathomable scenes and actions that seemed to go nowhere, like the floating man, or the doubling of the persona of Rory (who or what Rory was stayed unclear anyway), or the "Help...!"-cries that came out of several different phones. Were these things maybe meant to be supernatural? Or was the whole movie one big dream??

It all went (I'm sorry to say) down the same dreary and pretentious drain. The pace is extremely slow, the dialogues are awkward, and the acting is unimpressive, except for Thomas Mann, but he couldn't save this project on his own. John Malkovich sure didn't help, with his (as so often) blatant over-acting.

This film was a complete waste of time and a complete mess. What the flip was happening? Absolutely no idea and even the summary on imdb was totally unrelated. What the ... were the characters about? The was a complete mess and if you imagine a director going out on the streets of New York say, and scraping dog mess from the pavement, this is what was presented to us.

Don't bother with this drivel, you'll thank me!

This chariot is a collection of clued together nothingness, John M is his normal boring self , don't know if this is a comic , horror or sci-fi ,it failed an all departments .Avoid if you have dishes to do or vacuum the house -it will be time better spent .