Causalidade

Expected a very low budget film with bad acting.

Got a moderate low budget film with pretty good acting.

The story and acting kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time and I really had no idea how it was going to turn out.

Would recommend it to anyone who enjoys b movie thrillers.

7.1.

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.

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.

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.

No pun intended - the movie tells a quite intriguing story. And yet it seems to focus more on the technical aspect of it (all being shot in one take - at least that is what it tells us). I did not check if that is true - nowadays you can make things look like they are being done in one long take, while you edit and cut at certain places.

Again I do not think it is that important. It looks good for sure, but the movie may annoy you with the whole who did that and why did they do it. We also have a few red herrings - and may guess wrong a few times. Just to get a resolution that is quite ... well out there. The ending itself either is able to save the whole thing (again no pun intended) or kill it off (another pun?) ... it is going to depend on how you feel about the twist ... and the story ... who is likeable and who has earned the audiences sympathy you ask? That's a good one.