waitungh's reviews

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.

Once started I couldn't stop watching it. As others have commented, this is a film that draws you in very easily and doesn't let go.

I love the mood of the piece, even though the spoken language is French, it is not too difficult to believe the Russian backdrop with its practical and down to earth characters who are a largely likable bunch. Though they are mostly lacking in sentimentality, yet they are gently encouraging and unexpectedly generous to the heroine through her hardships.

The visual style also suits the film perfectly and though deceptively simple, manages to fully convey the emotion of each character as well as the setting of each scene, which is at times hauntingly beautiful.

The story is a familiar one of perseverance in the face of adversity and it is easy to cheer the heroine on as she tries to adjust and overcome the obstacles she encounters.

The ending is a little abrupt until you watch the credits that continue the rest of the story, right to the close.

Touching, affirming and highly recommended.

This may be 'filler' but in the context of what this show is all about, it's utterly brilliant story telling, mixing comedy, tragedy and pathos. It gives the best and most extended narrative on the relationship between humans and creatures of myth and how the actions of one influences the action of the other. It doesn't hurt that the story contained within is a rollicking good one that I didn't want to end, even though, like all the best stories, it's slightly familiar. The twists and turns of Nessie McGowan were touching and hilarious by turns and the close of her story was very poetic. In my opinion, the most enjoyable episode so far.

I don't think Greg McClean wanted to make a monster movie. I think he wanted to make a movie about the Australian landscape and I wish he'd gone with that rather than this half-hearted effort about a monster crocodile, because this is a very well shot and technically polished movie.

However, if you've ever seen any creature-themed horror movie, the story will have very little in the way of surprise and therefore suspense.

The plot is the well-trodden path of a group of people trapped in a bad situation and being picked off one by one by the titular monster, whilst the survivors attempt to devise strategies to escape.

Some small spikes of interest show, such as a dilemma about what to use for bait to divert the monster and the arrival of a pair of colourful locals but I wish more was made about the creature's capacity for savagery, cunning and malice so that we as an audience could really fear and marvel at it.

Hints are dropped but they aren't really enough to enlarge the status of the creature beyond just a very large, aggressive crocodile. Whilst impressive, it doesn't ever really come across as terribly scary or evil. Fans of horror want their pound of flesh - we certainly got that in Greg's last film. I just wondered why he left it out of this one.

Too much time is spent focusing on the tourists and their trip and while setting up the protagonists is important, in the end I still didn't care if they were all eaten or not. Not really a sympathetic or vulnerable character in the lot. Neither is there much of an attempt at making any chemistry between the two leads.

The focus of the film therefore seems to be the landscape. The characters and the creature can't really compete.

This is a very chilly little story that is enjoyably dank and tense. A first class job is done building up the suspense and feeling of being in a distinctly uncomfortable place. The characterisation is sparse but well done with easily recogniseable stereotypes. A typical us vs them situation is established very quickly and the casualty rate moves in a predictable fashion. I thought the film was very good up until the last third, when I felt that the strength of the story could have done with some bolstering with some additional twists. Unfortunately I felt that it fell a little flat at the end, but I would still recommend it as good horror viewing.

This movie starts out relatively straight with a diamond heist that goes wrong. Everything seemingly normal and slightly tedious, I thought.

The film then slides slowly by inches down the path towards B-movie insanity. The odd thing is, the weirder, gorier and more ridiculous things get, the funnier and more enjoyable it becomes as well.

This is not a dumb film and there is a consistent and thought out story that appears on film, despite the odd silly "rubber chicken" prop moment.

I didn't have any qualms about the acting as the cast did a fantastic job staying in (dodgy Russian) character.

Whilst Brad does a good job keeping the audiences sympathy, supported ably by the very foxy Jamie Murray, a horror movie is only as good as its villains. They don't disappoint and for me are the real stars of this movie with Boris the security guard running a very close second.

From the opening credits I was enraptured with this movie. The throwaway cleverness of the visuals, seen in the time-honored tradition of flashback, lends further cynicism to a film saturated with the nihilistic posturings and ideas from a very twisted and brilliant mind. I loved it - even though I sort of knew what the film was about I was surprised by how sophisticated it was. This is not a Brad Pitt film in the way that I imagine Meet Joe Black to be (never saw it, the trailer was enough). He acts much the same as he always did.

Edward Norton is absolutely superb and the ultimate deadpan foil to the fantastic sequences that occur in the film. He rightly takes the lead for most of the movie and his sly, subversive comments are dropped with a poet's precision into each circumstance that our erstwhile anti-hero finds himself in.

This is film belongs to the "coming of age" genre in that it is a voyage into self-discovery and coming to terms with the world that we live in. It'll change your outlook if nothing else.

Must see.