Pieces of a Woman

It's a well acted tragic story that starts off excellently, but falls apart bit by bit the longer it goes until it ends on a whimper, as if the story got tired. Vanessa Kirby is equal parts excellent, and yet underacted in a sort of apathetic manner, where it began to hurt the story itself because her behavior was not shown to have anything underlying it, but her surface level was her entire level. Shia was excellent, as was the Mother. The film is very much in the style of Hungarian films, as the director is, and I say this in the way that this film could and would have been shot as a Hungarian film and played out exactly the same, if it had not been North American. In fact, it feels like an American adaptation of an existing Hungarian film, but this is it. The tone of the film jerks around somewhat, going with hard, every day realism, with odd smatterings of symbolism that just don't mesh well and come up like worn down speed humps on your drive, so instead of you getting seamless symbolism, they are stark and you are slapped aware of them when they show up. The dialogue is very good and realistic, except for a few instances where they get speechy and you start to fall out of the immersion because of it. The cinematography is very great, and the music works well. I think with some tweaks this could have been a great, even excellent movie, but what we got is a hampered result.