The Cormorants

The storyline above is a lie. This movie is 89 minutes of nothing. It gives no sense of past or change. It follows two kids around who do nothing and barely speak to each other. It has about 50 minutes of footage, from a distance, of them just walking, nowhere in particular. At the end of each walking scenes, they walk out of the shot and the camara just stays on the background scream for a while, like the crew all fell asleep and forgot they were supposed to be making a movie. All this movie did was move me 89 minutes closer to death. This review is longer than the script.

The coming-of-age film in a mostly natural setting can work, and work beautifully. Think Stand By Me, The Tree of Life, or Hide Your Smiling Faces. This is not one of those. The previous reviewer, who said "there is no story" was not exaggerating. There is NOTHING here, except beautiful photography, for which it gets the four stars.Not only is there no plot, there is no script. The film appears to be entirely improvised. I can only imagine the director told the young actors "Hang out by river, the woods, and the mall, and ignore the camera. Forget we're even here." That's it. What's more, there is so much potential for a story to break out in some scenes. The boys talk to two pretty girls in an amusement park. And cut. One boy is chased by some other kids. And cut.

The plot summary is completely false. There is no sense of time, no sense of change. I really did want to like this, but there is truly no "there" there.

Watch the preview & you'll see everything that happens in the film, just longer, slower, and with less point. It's like someone needed to make a 90min feature for art school so they got their younger cousins to run around in the woods for 2 days... 2 weeks... an entire summer. You'll never know. Trust me & the others, you'll never know. I've had several movies cheat me out of my time; many vignettes that had little action. This is the first to waste my time with very little action and absolutely no story. No, seriously, nothing... pointless. I'm serious when I say watch the preview and you'll see it all.

It has no plot or script. Just 2 boys with too much time on their hands doing NOTHING. Why would anyone actually watch it? I hate the producer's guts for making me waste so much time thinking something was going to happen. I think that would be an understandable minimum expectation.