Sonata

It's rubbish. More than rubbish. A celluloid turd. Actually, this movie looked like it wasn't made even with film.

It does look very cheap. The girl was a good actress, as was the mother slightly, but there was no good characterisation. It is extraordinarily slow-moving, boring and hugely unrewarding. It said it's an 18, but I didn't see anything to constitute it being an 18. I suppose I wanted shock, scares, blood and nastiness, and I didn't get any of that because it was a psychological horror film.

But even as a psychological horror film it was pants. The script was awful. It was just bad. Plain bad.

Don't be fooled by the cover and watch it. It's awful.

This movie has the look of a used $3 dollar crumpled note filmed for cheapness no doubt on early video technology so the images are distinctly mushy. Poor as much of this straight to video fodder is, it has I must say an odd creepy texture to it. The story has a disturbing quality, like some sort of Roald Dahl children's tale darkened for adults. Not exactly a horror film it's hard to categorise exactly what it is, a tale of the unexpected perhaps but it did hold my attention to see how it played out and the ending did surprise me.

Megan, a beautiful young woman with an incredible innocence(played by award winning actress Nicole Duport)is becoming deeply troubled. It may be that it is the onset of teenage schizophrenia; or it may be the combination of a strange stalker outside and a suffocating mother, but all attempts to cope are defeated by Samantha, an unfeeling cruel narcissistic single-parent(think "mommy dearest" played by actress Annie Scott Rodgers). Once mom's business partner/part-time suitor Allen (played very effectively by actor Tim Halpin) chances a visit to her room, well, all hell breaks out. And that is what this story is....the hell that is Megan's mind. Beautifully shot in High Definition by award winning cinematographer Vance Piper, this is a film that will gain an enduring and loyal audience. Filmmaker Boris Undorf, the writer-director, spent two years in the writing and is the new Hitchcock with this breakout work.Must see all the way through....it is worth it!

This movie rise a lot of problem for today people time being, roots of this film going back to such masters as Antonioni, Fellini,Tarkovsky,Bergman(Director and author Boris Undorf had a very good teachers). This is a thriller but thriller that force you to think about relations between parents and children, about border between childhood and adult life, about children privacy etc., This is a sort of investigation of existing problem that parents and children face everyday. Author gradually opens for you character of two women, shown how mother could destroy her own child. The biggest role in this movie belongs to the music. It is not much words between the main characters and director find the way to express people fillings. Both main characters give you right impression about conflict that keep you busy all 91 minutes of film.

This film has some great moments in it. Recall that it is a first film from writer/director Boris Undorf. It has style and is not nearly the bore that one reviewer claimed. In fact, it's far more worthy of attention than most of the garbage that I've seen in theaters or on DVD lately.

I refer to it as horror/thriller only because I don't know how else it could be categorized. It has a great use of color and has unnerving scenes that make you squirm - most notably the mother's insistence that her daughter strip for her and another scene in which the mother's lover "makes a pass" at the young girl. I felt increasingly uncomfortable as I watched the main character, wondering how she could stay sane at all in her nightmare-fairytale world.

It's a shame that more people can't give this movie a try. These days, "horror" cinema seems to be made up of films about topless airheads who are tortured to death or psycho killers who go from one cliché to the next until it seems that the only things that have been changed are the names in the same tired old story.

If you are looking for horror clichés like "the sheriff who just can't help because there's no proof" or "let's go check out that weird noise but first we should have sex" then you aren't going to like this film. But if you are looking for an actual story with a set-up and a fresh character piece then this is worth a look.