On the positive side, I was intrigued and interested most of the time, and the movie is professionally shot, it isn't B-movie amateurism. The mystery is unusual - certainly far more original than what we get from tons of mindless thrillers that are all about invincible, time/space-bending psycho-killers who seem to have more power than Beelzebub and his pals Baphomet and Belial.
No such BS here. It's not about blood, guts and wounded cops running through abandoned factories. It's not about an omniscient serial-killer who easily predicts the actions of 50 cops, 7 detectives and 115 screaming victims, as if he were a demon from Hell's loins. It's a genuine mystery...
Except that it has no resolution. Zero. The big negative is the ending, which is random, meaningless, incomplete, lazy and "artsy". I can't stand films with sudden endings, they always smell of desperation.
There's the obvious possibility, or at least theory, that the protagonist, James, is the killer. Certainly that would explain the dubious, extraordinarily huge "coincidence" of him getting involved in an urban-legend-like mystery that may lead to his wife's murderer. Or the fact that he finds the elusive 3rd tape in his flat, marked by his own writing - which would 100% mean James killed her. Or the fact that in a very early scene he has a vision of his wife wearing that mask - and that's before he even saw one of those mysterious tapes. Unless there was supernatural involvement, of which there is no real evidence, James would appear to have to be the killer.
But there are so many problems with that explanation - which is, sadly, the only half-way viable explanation, because everything else that happens is random nonsense, disconnected. Interesting nonsense, but from a logical standpoint utter hooey, none of which ties up with anything else. I don't mean that it doesn't tie in neatly, I mean that all of those characters and events don't connect at all, in any way shape or form. They can't. They are random dead-ends devised either to annoy us, fascinate (then disappoint) us, or because the writer was completely lost.
Yes, a lost and confused witter tearing the hair off his head in frustration as he sits over his laptop trying to write something good. Cinema-goers trust writers and directors way too implicitly, hence so often end up making excuse for the film's failings, not realizing that most writers are struggling semi-hacks or total dilettantes, not at all the "(mis)understood geniuses" that fans fantasize about. Cinema-goers overrate film-makers' intellects far too often and too much. They idealize them because cinema-goers live in a fantasy world, they are more disconnected (on average) than people who watch films only sporadically. It's no coincidence that the vast majority of film fanatics are Reds: delusion and confusion are part-and-parcel of their beings. They are pushovers for propaganda, they are naive, they are child-like, yet often pretentious. But that's another story...
Going back to why the "James the killer" theory doesn't work... Firstly, he seems genuinely upset about the death of his wife and/or her disappearance. (The details of her disappearance aren't clarified, which is a bit pathetic. We don't know anything abut how she disappeared, whether her body was found, nothing.) Unless he is a textbook case of a mega-schizophrenic, there is no way he could be her killer, and the killer of the two other women. There is no way he'd go through all that trouble just to miraculously "forget" that he killed them all, to "fix them". Did he have amnesia? If so, we should have been told when and how he lost his memory. He names "fixing phones" as his only hobby, which might be a hint that he is the "fixer" i.e. Women-killer, that he needs to "fix" women. Though why kill two random women at such large intervals (years in-between) then end with the murder of his own wife? Serial-killers don't murder their own wives. It's certainly extremely rare.
Then there's that guy he accuses of being the killer. His behaviour is not that of an innocent person, especially not with that semi-evil smirk he gives while tied and sitting in "the room". Besides, if he wasn't the killer how would he know where the clips were filmed? Unless this guy is a figment of James's schizo imagination? Or maybe he exists but James sees him as James chooses to? In this case the director would be not only manipulating the viewer, he'd be toying with us, giving us nothing. Which would be garbage writing.
And that's when we run into the next problem... If James is schizo and the entire film is shown through his mind, then NOTHING that appears on screen has any meaning whatsoever. If James is the killer then the director completely failed to help us distinguish between the real world and James's fantasy world - something a competent, wise director would have to do for such a "split-reality" or "alternating reality" script. If he is the killer then NONE of the other characters might be real. Not to mention all the other problems I already listed about this theory...
Besides, this protagonist-is-real-killer-and-he's-insane-too twist is nothing new. It's been done before. Protagonist's insanity has been worked to death in thrillers and horror films, even dramas. If it is true that James is the killer that would not only be far-fetched, it would be unoriginal too. A cop-out even. Because "how do I solve this mess I created?" the writer might have asked himself as he started planning to write the last few pages. "Where do I go from here, how do I conclude this maze? Oh, I know, James is the killer! That way I don't have to explain the numerous loose ends and weird all-knowing characters that keep showing up out of literally nowhere". Or a computer that speaks directly to James... Or the clip addressing James by his name (which is more "proof" that he's crazy).
James being the killer would imply that the director had LIED all along, totally deceived the audience, which is a terrible way to "entertain" and to forge a story. Lying is easy, any moron can do it. Try telling the truth to the audience yet still manage to surprise them: that is the trick. Not many can do that, of course... It requires very clever and disciplined writing.
Still, because I had no idea that the story had no ending and that it was random drivel all along, I got a chance to be immersed in it to an extent. That's much better than being bored out of my skull, which is what most movies do...
No such BS here. It's not about blood, guts and wounded cops running through abandoned factories. It's not about an omniscient serial-killer who easily predicts the actions of 50 cops, 7 detectives and 115 screaming victims, as if he were a demon from Hell's loins. It's a genuine mystery...
Except that it has no resolution. Zero. The big negative is the ending, which is random, meaningless, incomplete, lazy and "artsy". I can't stand films with sudden endings, they always smell of desperation.
There's the obvious possibility, or at least theory, that the protagonist, James, is the killer. Certainly that would explain the dubious, extraordinarily huge "coincidence" of him getting involved in an urban-legend-like mystery that may lead to his wife's murderer. Or the fact that he finds the elusive 3rd tape in his flat, marked by his own writing - which would 100% mean James killed her. Or the fact that in a very early scene he has a vision of his wife wearing that mask - and that's before he even saw one of those mysterious tapes. Unless there was supernatural involvement, of which there is no real evidence, James would appear to have to be the killer.
But there are so many problems with that explanation - which is, sadly, the only half-way viable explanation, because everything else that happens is random nonsense, disconnected. Interesting nonsense, but from a logical standpoint utter hooey, none of which ties up with anything else. I don't mean that it doesn't tie in neatly, I mean that all of those characters and events don't connect at all, in any way shape or form. They can't. They are random dead-ends devised either to annoy us, fascinate (then disappoint) us, or because the writer was completely lost.
Yes, a lost and confused witter tearing the hair off his head in frustration as he sits over his laptop trying to write something good. Cinema-goers trust writers and directors way too implicitly, hence so often end up making excuse for the film's failings, not realizing that most writers are struggling semi-hacks or total dilettantes, not at all the "(mis)understood geniuses" that fans fantasize about. Cinema-goers overrate film-makers' intellects far too often and too much. They idealize them because cinema-goers live in a fantasy world, they are more disconnected (on average) than people who watch films only sporadically. It's no coincidence that the vast majority of film fanatics are Reds: delusion and confusion are part-and-parcel of their beings. They are pushovers for propaganda, they are naive, they are child-like, yet often pretentious. But that's another story...
Going back to why the "James the killer" theory doesn't work... Firstly, he seems genuinely upset about the death of his wife and/or her disappearance. (The details of her disappearance aren't clarified, which is a bit pathetic. We don't know anything abut how she disappeared, whether her body was found, nothing.) Unless he is a textbook case of a mega-schizophrenic, there is no way he could be her killer, and the killer of the two other women. There is no way he'd go through all that trouble just to miraculously "forget" that he killed them all, to "fix them". Did he have amnesia? If so, we should have been told when and how he lost his memory. He names "fixing phones" as his only hobby, which might be a hint that he is the "fixer" i.e. Women-killer, that he needs to "fix" women. Though why kill two random women at such large intervals (years in-between) then end with the murder of his own wife? Serial-killers don't murder their own wives. It's certainly extremely rare.
Then there's that guy he accuses of being the killer. His behaviour is not that of an innocent person, especially not with that semi-evil smirk he gives while tied and sitting in "the room". Besides, if he wasn't the killer how would he know where the clips were filmed? Unless this guy is a figment of James's schizo imagination? Or maybe he exists but James sees him as James chooses to? In this case the director would be not only manipulating the viewer, he'd be toying with us, giving us nothing. Which would be garbage writing.
And that's when we run into the next problem... If James is schizo and the entire film is shown through his mind, then NOTHING that appears on screen has any meaning whatsoever. If James is the killer then the director completely failed to help us distinguish between the real world and James's fantasy world - something a competent, wise director would have to do for such a "split-reality" or "alternating reality" script. If he is the killer then NONE of the other characters might be real. Not to mention all the other problems I already listed about this theory...
Besides, this protagonist-is-real-killer-and-he's-insane-too twist is nothing new. It's been done before. Protagonist's insanity has been worked to death in thrillers and horror films, even dramas. If it is true that James is the killer that would not only be far-fetched, it would be unoriginal too. A cop-out even. Because "how do I solve this mess I created?" the writer might have asked himself as he started planning to write the last few pages. "Where do I go from here, how do I conclude this maze? Oh, I know, James is the killer! That way I don't have to explain the numerous loose ends and weird all-knowing characters that keep showing up out of literally nowhere". Or a computer that speaks directly to James... Or the clip addressing James by his name (which is more "proof" that he's crazy).
James being the killer would imply that the director had LIED all along, totally deceived the audience, which is a terrible way to "entertain" and to forge a story. Lying is easy, any moron can do it. Try telling the truth to the audience yet still manage to surprise them: that is the trick. Not many can do that, of course... It requires very clever and disciplined writing.
Still, because I had no idea that the story had no ending and that it was random drivel all along, I got a chance to be immersed in it to an extent. That's much better than being bored out of my skull, which is what most movies do...