waitungh

This flows along almost exactly like a nightmare, with skewed logic and a depressingly nihilistic ending.

I don't like these films where the protagonist just ends up making everything worse with the best of intentions.

It's a bit like watching a cat playing with a mouse before inevitably biting it's head off when it gets bored. That's how I felt watching this movie and while I sympathised with the mouse, I didn't particularly enjoy watching its futile struggles.

I also didn't particularly like the main character. He started off reasonably relatable and competent, but quickly turned into a reactive pile of irrational mush as events spiraled out of his ability to control or cope with them. While again, this may be realistic in terms of how ordinary people behave in such a scenario, it doesn't make for particularly good viewing.

One must be rooting for the main character and when they start making too many wrong choices, you start disengaging from them and the narrative.

Also the rules for dealing with the "rotten" are utterly non-sensical and just seem to be poorly made up. The whole backstory of how the 'cleaners' are supposed to deal with the 'rotten' is frankly missing.

I found the film enjoyable and there was enough going on that I didn't feel it was moving at too slow a pace.

I came away from the film thinking about the main character and wishing I knew more about her, especially her past, her motivations and feelings.

Without her character being fully fleshed out in this way, then having another character to sympathise being thrown into the mix means that neither character gets the screen time they deserve for the audience to sink fully into their world and that is the main criticism I have with this film.

To take the example of "Let the right one in" to which this is compared, a large amount of time is spent on the main character, letting the audience fully get into his life and head, before gradually shifting the focus to the vampiric other. It works beautifully and we are fully invested in how events turn out.

Unfortunately almost none of this happens here as they are admittedly two completely different films. Nonetheless more time could have been spent on Mina as the main protagonist and her world-view before shifting to the plight of the boy and his suffering, little of which is depicted other than the scars and almost all that happened to him is inferred.

A little inference is fine and is a great way for an audience to fill in their own interpretation of what horrors may or may not have occurred.

Unfortunately too much is inferred for the main characters and the explicitness we do see has hardly any emotional resonance as it happens to the characters who are peripheral to the story.

I'd much rather it was the other way around - more time on the horrors that the main characters have experienced and are going through, and less on the demise of the lesser characters.

So instead of reinforcing the resolution that each eventually achieves, willing or not, each character takes away from the other with their presence in the story and its outcome.

The very definition of popcorn viewing.

I love it.