User reviews

Appearing in the sky for eleven minutes, a mysterious object has a significant impact on those who sight it in this offbeat drama from Jerzy Skolimowski. Best known as the director of 'Deep End', 'The Shout' and more recently 'Essential Killing', Skolimowski is a filmmaker who excels with unconventional narratives, a description that describes this film in spades. The movie consists of the same eleven minutes played out (a cataclysmic concluding event aside) from all different angles. The film has at least a dozen main characters and as the narrative constantly jumps around, never following one character for more than five minutes at a time, it becomes a tad hard to follow. It is also a movie in which it is difficult to become attached to any of the characters since none of them are fleshed out in depth, give or take a jealous husband and a hotdog vendor with a mysterious checkered past. Fortunately, the symbolism alone is sufficiently interesting; we never see what exactly the object in the sky is, nor do we need to as it represents fate. The film also opens innovatively, with footage from a smartphone camera, from a laptop camera and CCTV security camera all thrown our way before Skolimowski gives us 2.35:1 aspect ratio conventional film footage - for some reason that no doubt links to the mysterious sky object. With so much left deliberately unclear, this is a tricky film to recommend. It is thought-provoking though, if perhaps not as satisfying as earlier Skolimowski efforts such as 'King, Queen, Knave' and 'The Lightship' with Robert Duvall.

It's a bold international take on movies like Crash, and even with perspectives you would not expect, but it is slightly difficult to follow.

Choppy narrative at first, stick with it. Great use and metaphor of cameras and screens. OMG ending rewards patience. Richard Dormer sweet smiling malevolence or not?

Nothing in this movie makes sense or gets explained. I gave it a second star only because for a brief scene at the end you actually care and the cinematography for that one brief scene is awesome. As for the rest of the movie? A whole lot of questions and wasted time where nothing gets explained and you wasted a chunk of your life on some pricks pretentious movie that some pretentious losers might say is art, but it's garbage. All garbage.

I think there are 7 interlinked stories that wind down to some sort of anticlimactic climax.

In the end you will wonder what you watched and why you stuck it out to the end....

Unfortunately, this is the type of movie that draws out all those filmmakers who want to weigh in on what the director did wrong. I'm not a filmmaker, so I just sat back and enjoyed this director's efforts.

All the characters were interesting, and I particularly liked the director's decision to cut back and forth between the various players as the narrative moved forward. That choice requires a little more effort on our part, but it's well worth the effort.

All in all, I had a great time, even if I did get most of my anxiety buttons pushed, but that's what happens when a film builds suspense slowly and relentlessly.

If you're the type of person who enjoys most kinds of movies, then you'll enjoy the unusual approach they took with this one, and it has my most hearty recommendation.

Well, I loved it. I was fascinated from the start and enjoyed every single minute. Cannot understand all the low ratings. I just want to be entertained, I don't want to (or need to!) critique every aspect of the film making. Last scenes are BRILLIANT!!!

It's a great film, building tension throughout to the final minutes leaving one guessing as to the final outcome, which I couldn't guess.

I was left thinking after surely the ending should have been obvious, until as one interprets dreams, or as Freud hints at in his book the Interpretation of Dreams, that is one remembers one's dreams upon waking and thus I only decided it should have been obvious after, and so realised instead that this suggested the film was in fact that well-crafted and I only wanted to have thought it that obvious, but in fact I didn't. And so, it means that, I can go back to the idea that I was indeed left guessing... Thus a good emotional feeling based on a film full of tension and twists as well as what seem to be temporal shifts based on well-crafted edits and cuts from scene to scene up to the final moments.

If one has read Henri' Lefebvre, what he calls a Leibniz's House perspective.

What he meant was that to get the sense of a thing, such as a house, one has to look at it from many perspectives, form multiple person's perspectives and over time too. This film kind of moves towards demonstrating the concept better than most.