micz81

I should start by saying one thing-this film does justice to all the characters and worldviews involved, showing the difficult circumstances that shape each of them and honestly presenting their specific struggles and life contexts. It shows both the good and bad sides of both parties.

We can empathize with the sovereign father, who embodies the effects that social injustice and the blind, stupid, and extremely unbalanced legal system in which our "modern society" functions have on individuals struggling with misfortune. His son, who is struggling with a life-changing decision, trying to break away from his father, who seems to be on the edge. The police chief, who tries to express his love for his son in a way he finds repulsive, yet feels necessary. The commander's son, who hesitates and even secretly rejects his father's guidance and worldview.

All four suffer from some kind of pressure, yet at the same time are forced to succumb to it in some way, which generates a huge, ethically defining internal conflict in each of them individually. We can observe these dramas in a very humane way, with respect for each of them. We can also connect with the warm, bright, good side of all these characters and their worldviews. In a broader sense, we also have the opportunity to feel the atmosphere of the worlds in which all these characters live: a sovereign world - full of despair, hatred, obsession, but also brotherhood, human kindness, support, a sense of community - and a world of "law" - filled with institutionalized, normalized aggression, oppressive, hierarchical thinking, but also deep love, true responsibility, and reason.

It looks like a Greek tragedy - all paths are both good and bad at the same time. I find it very refreshing to watch a film that tackles complex issues in an equally complex way. This film does NOT give you the answer as to who is right or good. Rather, it will prompt you to gather data yourself, REFLECT on the subject, and then, perhaps, just perhaps, you will choose your "side." But if you do... let me suggest - judging by all the honesty in the presentation of the stances here - that you may have simply missed the point. In my opinion, if the writer-director points to ANY direction in this broad moral issue presented in the film, if he wants us to find ANY answer to all these moral questions and conflicts, he points to... compassion.

I highly reccomend this movie to two kinds of people: extremists and denialists - the first group can pick the similarities of both sides of this moral issue, and the second group can start to think deeper in search for miningfull yet complex truths about reality they're avoiding to acknowledge.

It's a bit strange movie in terms of construction, feel and execution amd my experience of the final outcome is... mixed.

The first act feels like it is halfway in the second one - rushed, unnerving, tense. I kinda' understand the reasons for this choice. The theme, I think, suggests this approach - to establish early on the bizzare nature of this micro-society, to put us in uncomfortable setting. And that surely works. But I feel it creates a storytelling problem, it basically messes up in the viewer's head because - as a rather avandgarde move - conflicts itselt with hints of somewhat classical structure and vibe (like for example the voice over of the main character Margret, which suggests more standard/epic approach to the way the story gonna be told). That decision puts us away from characters right from the start, I think, as the TENSION feels more important than the HUMAN BEINGS who experience it before our eyes. Therefore it's hard to establish connection, hard to identify with those people - which, I believe, is needed at the beginning to actually be able to care for them trough the rest of the movie.

This chaotic, unnerving tension is present troughout the whole movie actually, which results in everything being kinda' comperably important, similarly bizzare, constantly on the edge. There are very few moments when this fast rythm pauses. Too few. I felt exhausted and at the same time very bored because of this. And this decision - again, I think, rooted in the concept of creating an eperience rather than a story - I don't get, because the movie lasts for 140 minutes, there was plenty of time to make some deeper, calmer pauses.

Then, there are the dialogues - very elaborative, witty, and even theatrically charming, but also constantly used to explain something instead of showing it. Of corse, this language (and those vast amounts of it) tells us a lot about the characters - flawed, insecure, pretentious, constantly ventilating their egos, covering up their complexes - but I felt it was also overused (as if by opportunity) as a storytelling device. The quiet one - Margret - seemed not being used enough to contradict all that mumbling, to point out its emptiness and therefore making it to be felt as actually needed on the screen in such extent for the story to be told.

There were also I think too many side threads here, too many strings being pulled from all over the directions - let's show harsh environment, but briefly, because we have to find time to also portray writing block, young foolish love, jalousy, coming out of age fascination, and some outside people whose appearance will serve only to depict the same qualities of main characters, which we have already established in earlier scenes.

This movie is flawed, but I liked the ambition behind it - to portray troubled, almost insane individuals and their strange micro society, to depict female strategic energy and male blind impulsiveness (Adam and Eve came to my mind few times), to comment of evil within us. Partially it was delivered, I think.

It's not a bad movie. Surely thought provoking. I think it will stay in my memory - more so since it was based on authentic events (which came to me as a surprise as I didn't knew beforehand). It just failed, in my opinion, midway trough its ambition.

I'm sorry, but this is a failure. In all fields.

First of all, it is immediately obvious that this film was based on a book. From the first minutes you FEEL that the script is not constructed as it should be if it were created with "film language" in mind. The "conversion layer" is so present that you simply feel it in the pacing, in the narrative structure, in the dialogue, and especially in the staging - scenes without vision or deeper conflict seemed to me more like visualizations of paragraphs filled with repetition and descriptive dialogue, rather than visual storytelling sequences. It's a book CONVERTED into a movie. Not ADAPTED.

Secondly, the film is full of nonsense in terms of believability. The characters just behave stupidly and chaotically. The question remains - is it the writer's, director's or actors' fault? I suppose that unfortunately the script and direction failed - actor just did what they were told to do. The things we see on the screen may have been described in a book in a credible way, supported by psychology and a better introduction, thus being considered probable while reading. In other words, such nonsense could be considered believable in a book. But in the movie - where we SEE things, not IMAGINE them - these women just act like children. Period. Not once, not twice, but many times. And - what is even sadder - almost always at pivotal points of the history. So almost all dramatic events shown in the film are the result of... completely senseless decisions of the characters.

After 25 minutes into the film I just gave up, lost all hope. Because by then it was already quite clear that these behaviors will not be explained to me in any mature way anyway. Grown women acting like children. In the forest. That's all. Maybe if the director had found better staging ideas... maybe if the scriptwriter had written these scenes a bit differently.... But it's quite the opposite - many, many, many moments in the film feel completely amateurish not only in terms of the believability of the characters, but also the tension, tone, and rhythm of the story.

Thirdly, the keys to great mysteries stuffed into the plot do not meet expectations. There are three timelines shown in the film, and each of them has its own set of secrets to discover, which - as a bonus - are slightly intertwined between the timelines. It's. A. Mess. If I'm counting correctly, there are 7 to 10 major questions in this story that need to be answered in three timelines. And all of them are revealed almost by accident and leave the viewer... unimpressed firstly by the way they are resolved and secondly by the banality of themselves. Everything here is... A Force of Nature, I suppose. But this approach to storytelling requires some reinforcement, some foundation to make us believe that the narrator is deliberately trying to emphasize this thread, this underlying theme and thereby show us something significant, something hidden between the lines. Here - we have the impression that the meaning of the film, the tone and the message are just another accidents.