tdg-2

Avalon (2011)

Boring and pretentious

As a big fan of Nordic cinema I'm always interested in new names and faces. Well... Axel Petersén is a new name to me and he certainly seems to have at least a few good ideas, but all in all I hope he will choose better friends for his next movie. This one was just boring and pretentious.

The protagonists (all of them) lack any credibility, they're only skin deep, and they run around, act and react like headless chickens. There's no way you can relate to anyone of them. Nothing wrong with an experimental approach but the experiment in this movie (for instance the ridiculous 'Avalon' discotheque sequence) is a kind of 'worst of the sixties'. Apart from that the camera-work was the most annoying since the invention of dogma 95.

Although some of Pederséns friends seem beyond suspicion... I was surprised to see the name of Hoyte van Hoytema passing by in the 'thanks' region... please listen better to his advice next time. And how in Privatdetektiven Kant's name did Carl Johan De Geer get involved with this? What a waste of real (experimental) talent.

About halfway through it suddenly struck me that this was like watching a Dutch movie... now you know where the title of this review comes from.

And by the way, the subject 'man goes berserk when confronted with unexpected horror' was handled a lot more plausible and creepy in the 2007 Danish movie 'Hvid Nat'.