I appreciate many simple, slow-burn films, such as The Lighthouse, I'm Thinking of Endings Things, and In the Bedroom, so I am not allergic to the style.
This one may simply come down to taste. In reading the A. V. Club's glowing review, the aspects that delighted the critic did nothing for me.
The script offers little and is dulled by a painfully slow pace. Examples of things that didn't do it for me:
-Multiple minutes were used to show someone arriving somewhere -A Cage monologue talking about periodic earthquakes that doesn't seem to make any sense nor have clear relevance to its context -Odd editing choices: >Characters are cut off repeatedly during non-filler dialogue >An intimate scene between two characters seeing each other for the first time in who knows how long, that never cuts to even a single close-up of either character, staying in a wide shot that shows no facial expressions for the duration of the scene. There is not even interesting body language that the director chose to focus on or anything that could be offered as a motivation for this -We are given little reason to care even slightly for any of the characters, so when things happen to them, there is no emotional payoff
You could of course do much worse, but even at a modest 92 minutes, I wish I'd done something else.
This one may simply come down to taste. In reading the A. V. Club's glowing review, the aspects that delighted the critic did nothing for me.
The script offers little and is dulled by a painfully slow pace. Examples of things that didn't do it for me:
-Multiple minutes were used to show someone arriving somewhere -A Cage monologue talking about periodic earthquakes that doesn't seem to make any sense nor have clear relevance to its context -Odd editing choices: >Characters are cut off repeatedly during non-filler dialogue >An intimate scene between two characters seeing each other for the first time in who knows how long, that never cuts to even a single close-up of either character, staying in a wide shot that shows no facial expressions for the duration of the scene. There is not even interesting body language that the director chose to focus on or anything that could be offered as a motivation for this -We are given little reason to care even slightly for any of the characters, so when things happen to them, there is no emotional payoff
You could of course do much worse, but even at a modest 92 minutes, I wish I'd done something else.