A depressing horror drama that is slow, confusing and leaves way too many unknowns in its flimsy equation.
The slow pace isn't much of an issue because the direction is moody and stylish enough to justify it. The real issue here for half the scenes is the uniquely muddled time-lines. I have never come across a movie that so often refuses to share with us WHEN something is happening. We have three basic time-settings: during Lizzy's pregnancy, during Emma's stay, and after Emma's murder - in that chronological order. That is a lot to mesh together, even when you allow the audiences to understand which is which, let alone when you don't. The plot hops and jumps freely and constantly from one to the other without taking the audiences into consideration. We are meant to guess half the time which scene belongs to which period. It becomes exasperating. I want to follow the PLOT and the characters, not have to guess the times.
So should movies be guessing games? Isn't that what mysteries are all about? Well... no, of course not. There ARE basic rules to story-telling that one needs to abide by, even in mysteries, otherwise the story isn't mysterious - it's incoherent: huge difference. A whole bunch of reviews mention this time confusion, so clearly the movie has failed in its "experimentation" with time. Unless annoying most people was the intentional aim here.
What's next? Will they soon add masks to the main characters so we can't even distinguish them from each other? Why not just delete the audio track too so we are forced to lip-read? Hell, turn the entire movie into a confusing puzzle-mess!
The time shifts double the already growing confusion regarding what is happening. The film opens with a very confusing sequence that it takes ages for us to decipher. Is Lizzy insane? Are both women insane? If both are insane, wouldn't that imply a demonic presence that is polluting their minds - as Lizzy claims? If there are demons, why do they so conveniently circumvent Isaac? Is it because he is mentally too strong for the demons to usurp? (Emma at one point says that Lizzy and Isaac are tougher than she and her husband Gideon.) Why is Isaac constantly absent? Where the hell can he go? Shouldn't he be working on his farm? How the hell did he manage to cheat on his wife with only four people co-existing on a large field? When Isaac visited Emma for the ol' in-out, where was Gideon? Did they arrange their clandestine meetings via mobile phones?
Is the preacher a victim or a demon summoner? Lizzy had met him earlier when she first arrived to the desolate farm, yet she finds him dead after his visit years later. Or was that just a hallucination?
Too many questions. I really like ambiguous horror flicks, especially slow moody ones, so I should love this film, right? I don't, because for one thing, it's way too glum, and secondly it leaves too many loose ends. The fun in a riddle is getting hints and figuring out how to make sense out of them. For that you need ENOUGH hints. This movie offers far too few. The script is too hint-poor to justify being a thinking-man's horror. It offers too many possible conclusions along with too few solid facts - along with a multiple-time-line story that only exacerbates all of this. An equation with 50 unknowns isn't an equation: it's a mess.
We are given too little information about the characters as well as the other basics. Aside from the fact Lizzy is German we know nothing about either her or the others. So what fighting chance have we even got in figuring out this riddle?
The slow pace isn't much of an issue because the direction is moody and stylish enough to justify it. The real issue here for half the scenes is the uniquely muddled time-lines. I have never come across a movie that so often refuses to share with us WHEN something is happening. We have three basic time-settings: during Lizzy's pregnancy, during Emma's stay, and after Emma's murder - in that chronological order. That is a lot to mesh together, even when you allow the audiences to understand which is which, let alone when you don't. The plot hops and jumps freely and constantly from one to the other without taking the audiences into consideration. We are meant to guess half the time which scene belongs to which period. It becomes exasperating. I want to follow the PLOT and the characters, not have to guess the times.
So should movies be guessing games? Isn't that what mysteries are all about? Well... no, of course not. There ARE basic rules to story-telling that one needs to abide by, even in mysteries, otherwise the story isn't mysterious - it's incoherent: huge difference. A whole bunch of reviews mention this time confusion, so clearly the movie has failed in its "experimentation" with time. Unless annoying most people was the intentional aim here.
What's next? Will they soon add masks to the main characters so we can't even distinguish them from each other? Why not just delete the audio track too so we are forced to lip-read? Hell, turn the entire movie into a confusing puzzle-mess!
The time shifts double the already growing confusion regarding what is happening. The film opens with a very confusing sequence that it takes ages for us to decipher. Is Lizzy insane? Are both women insane? If both are insane, wouldn't that imply a demonic presence that is polluting their minds - as Lizzy claims? If there are demons, why do they so conveniently circumvent Isaac? Is it because he is mentally too strong for the demons to usurp? (Emma at one point says that Lizzy and Isaac are tougher than she and her husband Gideon.) Why is Isaac constantly absent? Where the hell can he go? Shouldn't he be working on his farm? How the hell did he manage to cheat on his wife with only four people co-existing on a large field? When Isaac visited Emma for the ol' in-out, where was Gideon? Did they arrange their clandestine meetings via mobile phones?
Is the preacher a victim or a demon summoner? Lizzy had met him earlier when she first arrived to the desolate farm, yet she finds him dead after his visit years later. Or was that just a hallucination?
Too many questions. I really like ambiguous horror flicks, especially slow moody ones, so I should love this film, right? I don't, because for one thing, it's way too glum, and secondly it leaves too many loose ends. The fun in a riddle is getting hints and figuring out how to make sense out of them. For that you need ENOUGH hints. This movie offers far too few. The script is too hint-poor to justify being a thinking-man's horror. It offers too many possible conclusions along with too few solid facts - along with a multiple-time-line story that only exacerbates all of this. An equation with 50 unknowns isn't an equation: it's a mess.
We are given too little information about the characters as well as the other basics. Aside from the fact Lizzy is German we know nothing about either her or the others. So what fighting chance have we even got in figuring out this riddle?