tonybellew

Painfully bad. Moody lighting and psychedelic cinematography cannot hide just how poor this film is. Reminds me of Apocalypse Now, in that it looks like the entire cast and crew were off their faces during filming. Sadly, when they sobered up, they apparently didn't recognise the tripe of a movie they'd made while tripping.

We all know by now that Elisabeth Moss is a great actress, and I think that showed in season 1 more than eve in The Handmaid's Tale. Her disfunctional relationships cast a pall over her whole life, and her unerring sense of justice doesn't help her cope with the greyer areas of small town politics. By the end you are physically relieved that she seemed to find some sort of happiness.

Roll on season 2. What a difference. After everything goes wrong in New Zealand she returns to her job in Sydney, investigating the death of a Thai prostitute washed up on a beach. The tone is much darker, but the overriding sense I took from it is that every man in this season is majorly flawed, with next to no redeeming features. Her male colleagues are all lecherous, incompetent, lazy, misogynistic, or a mixture of all of the above. Those not police are pimps, incels, or cuckolds. A father who stands by while his troubled teenage daughter dates a forty-something pimp and his wife lives part time with her lesbian lover. A gang of incel students who sit around discussing their favourite prostitutes. On the whole I found it hard to see past the manhate to enjoy the end of the season.