I guess "challenging" is the word I keep coming back to when thinking about Eureka. It's a 3.5-hour-long movie with a completely sepia color scheme that follows three survivors of a deadly bus hijacking as they navigate life in the wake of such a traumatic event. It doesn't sugarcoat anything, and there's absolutely nothing easy or "Hollywood" about it. The film is mostly about these three people feeling stuck in place, and even when they try to go on a road trip to physically escape where they've been, it just creates further problems mentally and emotionally for the lot of them.
It looks bleak, the story is bleak, and it's likely to make you as a viewer feel bleak. I think the emotional state it conjures up is unique, or if not entirely unprecedented, I think it's fair to say that few films about grief create a sensation exactly like this one does, while also sustaining such an unpleasant, uneasy feeling for so long. That makes Eureka the kind of movie that's hard to recommend, and I don't think I even really "liked" it - but I think I got something out of it, even with the pacing, length, and very blunt (and sustained) emotional content making it a difficult watch.
It reminded me a little of the 2018 film An Elephant Sitting Still. I think that one's a good deal better (and a little longer, from memory), but that's a film where dramatic, tragic events are built to throughout the film. Eureka's a film where the most intense event in the film happens right away, and then much of the three hours that follows is about what happens afterward. But in following a small group of characters who're all going through a harrowing time in their lives, there are some similarities between the two, and I think Eureka + An Elephant Sitting Still could make for one of the most intense and emotionally taxing (as well as almost eight-hour-long) double features in existence.
It looks bleak, the story is bleak, and it's likely to make you as a viewer feel bleak. I think the emotional state it conjures up is unique, or if not entirely unprecedented, I think it's fair to say that few films about grief create a sensation exactly like this one does, while also sustaining such an unpleasant, uneasy feeling for so long. That makes Eureka the kind of movie that's hard to recommend, and I don't think I even really "liked" it - but I think I got something out of it, even with the pacing, length, and very blunt (and sustained) emotional content making it a difficult watch.
It reminded me a little of the 2018 film An Elephant Sitting Still. I think that one's a good deal better (and a little longer, from memory), but that's a film where dramatic, tragic events are built to throughout the film. Eureka's a film where the most intense event in the film happens right away, and then much of the three hours that follows is about what happens afterward. But in following a small group of characters who're all going through a harrowing time in their lives, there are some similarities between the two, and I think Eureka + An Elephant Sitting Still could make for one of the most intense and emotionally taxing (as well as almost eight-hour-long) double features in existence.