Hal Hartley has always been an inconsistent filmmaker. He made the terrific Trust and a lot of good movies like Henry Fool and The Unbelievable Truth, but he has also made a frightening number of movies that are really, really, bad.
After the excellent Henry Fool, Hartley reached a sort of consistency, pumping out consistently terrible movies one after the other like Fay Grimm, No Such Thing, Book of Life, and the abysmal Girl from Monday.
Girl from Monday is a few different sorts of bad. It is a trite sci-fi story of the sort written by people who haven't read enough science fiction to know that their ideas are unoriginal. It is convoluted storytelling poorly held together by an inescapable voice-over in lieu of using action to tell story. It is filmed in a purposefully artsy style involving odd angles and breaks in action that does nothing to further the story and fails to create an interesting style.
Hartley is always at his best exploring the lives of odd people who can't communicate. But this movie has little of that classic Hartley approach to conversation outside of a short chat early on between the two leads. Mainly it's either narration or two characters exchanging information in a straightforward but uninteresting way.
Like No Such Thing and Fay Grimm, this is a genre movie from a director who is incapable of making genre movies. It is admirable that Hartley likes to try new things, but it's remarkable how bad he is when he gets out of his groove.
By the way, some people have suggested this is Hartley being Goddard. I absolutely hate Goddard. Just so you know where I'm coming from.
