Jessica Forever

Don't waste your time with this movie. Dull and boring!

I'm not quite sure why everyone is marking this movie so low. It's a fascinating look at masculinity for young men growing up in a violent, shoot-em-up world that is near-reality. The scene where they dance together is full of young boy angst, bubbling under the skin. Sure, it's slow-paced and grows, but the idea that a female presence can calm their anger in a way they have never known is interesting and explored well. I'm not keen on the ending, which seems to then go against what Jessica has in mind all along, but the idea that an unsaid terrible world event lurks in their past and is never named is very clever and maybe just a little too low key for the masses to grasp, but why are there drones, why is nobody about, why are huge houses empty? This is never addressed, which is part of the unique feel to the film. More movies like this are needed. It's not just beautiful, but the fact it is is only a tribute to the filmmakers.

Some weeks ago someone told me that there're director's that were made to create amazing music videos, but the ended up doing movies by some reason.

I think that's exactly what happened: a bunch of really well done and beautiful photography (charged with meaning) but with a very poor script and character development.

Sadly, the main idea seems good but is poorly developed and you finish the movie with an underwhelming feeling that you watched...nothing?

I get that experimental films are more focused on little details, on specific frames and photography (already said that), but this is not good at all.

This would've been an amazing music video, but as a movie...i don't know.

Yes this is a very beautiful movie. Cinematography is superb, artistic design - first class. In fact, all the technical aspects of film making are at their peak. So What!!?? We also get here a confused Christian fable with Jessica a mysterious woman and her twelve orphans. Twelve persecuted, tormented orphans all of whom get to participate in Pieta like scenes over and over again. And that's not all we get, we get loads of pretentious mysticism the idiotic notion that one can equate death with redemption and therefore with love. In other words we get a thematic mumbo jumbo that the director and script writer confused with a story.

It's beautiful, but it's also hollow and pompous and a waste of some obvious talents that did participate in its making.

To start off, I'm not sure exactly why Shudder acquired rights to this film. It's not horror, nor is it something that they'd usually push on their platform, especially as a "Shudder Original". At any rate, this movie is very... French. Super experimental, super weird, and super unrewarding.

The whole premise is supposed to be a dystopian world (which is not at all dystopian, but more like a late 2010s world where absolutely nothing has changed) where these misfit orphans rule the world and "take back what is rightfully theirs" (which never happens at all outside of dialogue). This is an intriguing enough story, and there are so many scenes in this movie that should have enriched it, but with all of the scenes and all of the characters, so little happens. In fact, you could argue that nothing at all happens.

And what does happen include some very weird things including but not limited to: letters on a birthday cake floating around, a dead sister reanimating to play a video game with her brother, a gun floating around a bedroom and speaking through another character, blood randomly covering someone, and someone lighting themselves on fire. And the list goes on.

Now, the writing isn't in itself terrible, but it's just a plot that is severely underutilized and does nothing in the way of storytelling. So maybe the whole point of the film was to show the inherent beauty of meaninglessness and the struggle of being alone, but I personally think that, A) if that was the point, it was done poorly, and B) stories like that aren't always great or enjoyable.

I do like an experimental film here and there, but this one was too grounded in reality for the absurdity to feel like any more than distraction and wasted potential.