Entrancing effects, but dubbed-sounding voices and wooden acting tip this movie into the bizarre
Something of a curate’s Fabergé egg, this peculiar Russian-made steampunk-lite fantasy feature has some interesting story ideas, entrancing visual effects and lovely sets. But many of the lead performances are painfully inert, exuding less verisimilitude than the story’s computer-generated fairies. Just to guide it deeper into the valley of the uncanny, nearly everyone in the film speaks English but with obviously dubbed voices, so while the phonemes roughly match the mouth movements, it’s a fair bet that different actors (often with American accents) recorded the dialogue in soundproof booths during post-production. That said, this last weirdness creates a kind of verfremdungseffekt, or sense of alienation, which dilutes any remaining realism and thus may be intentional.
Something of a curate’s Fabergé egg, this peculiar Russian-made steampunk-lite fantasy feature has some interesting story ideas, entrancing visual effects and lovely sets. But many of the lead performances are painfully inert, exuding less verisimilitude than the story’s computer-generated fairies. Just to guide it deeper into the valley of the uncanny, nearly everyone in the film speaks English but with obviously dubbed voices, so while the phonemes roughly match the mouth movements, it’s a fair bet that different actors (often with American accents) recorded the dialogue in soundproof booths during post-production. That said, this last weirdness creates a kind of verfremdungseffekt, or sense of alienation, which dilutes any remaining realism and thus may be intentional.
- 9/17/2020
- by Leslie Felperin
- The Guardian - Film News
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