Control

A young woman awakens in a stylish prison with no memory except for when she sleeps. Eileen played by Sarah Mitich, sees herself and her daughter in her dreams at a beach singing the same lullaby over and over again. An analog-sounding Alexa-type computer that appears to lack AI has monotone one-way answers to the questions which Sarah Mitich asks.

The computer forces her to complete tasks that become impossible to do without using Sara Mitich's psychokinetic powers, which Sarah learns to control over agony, distress, and fear whilst attempting to achieve the expected result of the test. She's threatened by the dormant Computer with the life of her child.

The cinematography is very good, and Sarah Mitich's acting is very believable. Her husband played by George Tchortov is a bit wooden but he is playing a comatose character.

A creative low budget film misses its marks. If you were to fast-forward Sarah Mitich's dream scenes you wouldn't miss anything. For example, the lullaby repeated often does not tie to anything.

I think that the film is still worth watching. The concept is Interesting.

The problem is that it doesn't do anything just fine. Everything in it's hit or miss and it clearly isn't batting 1.000.

The lead, good. Mystery, also good. The story, clever. The action, really good and the whole thing looks surprisingly good too.

The problem is Roger doesn't get enough to do, the story unfolds slower than it should especially given the style, there's too many flashbacks and the ending's underwhelming given the wait.

That said I think it's worth seeing cause even if it's not entirely original, it feels different and it does a lot well. The effort that went into it is clear and it shows.

I love slow burn movies, and non existent funding movies, when their done well.

Whilst this one was almost devoid of funding, it was also devoid of progress.

It took over an hour for anything beyond the most simplistic testing to happen, next to zero exposition in that time as well. Only to switch into warp speed for the last 20 minutes, but it also didn't go too far from the starting line.

Acting wasn't terrible, but many of the choices made by the 2 characters were ridiculous.

Eileen has psychokinesis, I can accept that without issue. SHE accepted it as evidenced in the testing... come to the test of putting a ball in a bucket....... nope we can't do that, BUT we'll remove 16 screws from the tables legs easily enough to no gain, and then move the ball in to the bucket.

Ditto when Roger is being killed in sand, no point trying to use her powers in stopping the flow of sand, or demolishing the cage he's in, go back to brute physical strength, of which she has none, and fail like a moron.

I would love it if just once in these movies the characters would use their psycho/telekinetic powers to rip out an entire wall of their cage and go on a rampage.

No pun intended - the movie that some may call a Cube knockoff (I wonder if there was something that inspired Cube back then?) ... and they are not completely wrong if you are honest with yourself. We wake up with the main character and we are as confused as she is. The initial surprise and really tight tension wear off though ... as time goes by.

While the movie seems to be able to add new nuggets (of information and otherwise), is it enough to keep you engaged towards the end? I would think that many will slowly lose interest ... it remains decent! And the ending may very well sway you to vote better than I did ... but is it really? The action is nice but sort of repeats itself towards the end - well no pun intended, right? Life is not a circle ... and we need to have an ending to things ... even if it means we have not moved forward ... at all!

There were good ideas in here, but basically the writer and director were not up to the task of producing a good movie. For example: the subject/lead is quite emotional and animated during the first 2/3 of the movie and during the last 10 minutes. But, during "phase 3" they had the actress walk around deadpan like Bride of Dracula. It was genuinely embarrassing.

The action scenes toward the climax literally repeat. If they did one more close up of her contorting hands, I would have stopped watching. I guess they didn't have the money or creativity to make something progressive and interesting?

To be fair, there are some engaging elements too, but- blah.