Causality

As the movie opens Claudia, a handsome fortyish woman is sitting at a sidewalk cafe having a drink and texting her prospective date Luis, a doctor she contacted through the social media. Luis repeatedly announces he will be late and finally doesn't show up. Claudia leaves the bar and is shortly after seen unconscious on the entrance steps of a hospital. She is admitted with symptoms that may indicate excessive alcohol consumption or something worse. She is attended to by the head nurse of the night shift, Romina, who brings her back from her faint and later loses track of her. The rest of the action is within the limits of the hospital and its entrance.

The movie has been shot in one single take, no cuts, so that everything happens in real time. We are invisible witnesses to the action in the hospital and.what we see (or hear from snatches of conversation, or guess from gestures) is what we get. For most of the time we follow Romina in her wanderings through the labyrinthine, dimly lit corridors of the hospital that has a dark, temporarily unused wing under repair. We are shown Romina's increasingly tense exchanges with other hospital personnel. At the end, an unexpected discovery clarifies some of the happenings, but, as in real life, loose ends remain and we are left to imagine how the remaining facts can be connected.

I found this movie endlessly fascinating and edge/of/you/seat suspenseful. The no cuts format is not a gimmick; it produces a thrilling sense of immediacy to the action. Acting is first rate, especially from Laura Novoa (Romina) who is on screen most of the time. She conveys to perfection her increasing bewilderment (even the neatness of her hairdo is gradually lost). Direction is fluid, music supports the action unobtrusively and the script is perfectly adapted to the tale. The director is identified under the pseudonym "Who", and a little Web search reveals him to be Marcelo Politano, who appears with his own name in the credits as producer and as one of the script writers. Besides Causality, Politano has two movie credits; Soy Tu Karma (I am your Karma, 2017) and Esencial (Essential, 2021). I have not seen either but on the basis of this film I will be waiting for more of his work.

Except for the wow factor of a single camera take, everything else is terrible and dumb. The plot is just all over the place and was so dumb, I thought I lost brain cells. Halfway through, I watched it on fast forward and even then it was dumb.

The initial setup for this movie is intriguing - a woman kidnapped but by whom and to what end? However the writer and director squander this solid base with a plot that is random and unfocussed. The film just drifts throughout and what plot development there is doesn't make much sense.

As for the this being lauded for being shot in a single sequence, if that's the best thing about the movie clearly there's not much else to it.

First of all let me just say that I am baffled by anyone giving it 1/10. I have no idea what those people have seen but it certainly wasn't this movie. Depending on your taste in movies I can understand people rating somewhere between 6 and 10. But ratings lower than that seem to come from people that truly hated this on a personal level, for god knows what reason.

The only thing I can think of that would cause people to really dislike Causality is their short attention spans. They seem to struggle to focus on anything that doesn't have some action, care chases, fights, etc. Every five minutes. In a addition they seem to get lost when the storyline is not simple to follow.

When I normally see very polarizing reviews on IMDB, I know I am in for a treat. Most of the time one of the main reasons for this huge divide is that some people just cannot handle slow, atmospheric movies. This movie seems to be no different.

If it comes to the movie itself it is certainly not perfect. But it is a great thriller nonetheless. I love the fact that for the first half of it I was confused about what is actually going on and who are the main protagonists. And this is clearly done on purpose. The best part is that at the end everything makes sense.

The direction was excellent as was acting. It's worth noting that the whole movie was done in one single shot. And this is not just a gimmick as it makes the whole experience very immersive.

All in all a solid 8/10 from me. I was considering giving it 10/10 just to offset those ridiculous 1/10 but I decided to be better than this.

This movie caught me by the way it uses the camera, the mystery to find out who is the criminal and why, what, How..etc.

Then came the twist to make things even better.