This is a solidly great film. It delivers on everything it promises - beautiful, original creature effects, a real sense of menace, boobs, and a fantastic musical score - and blithely throws in a few extras, like well-developed, interesting characters, a wonderful surreality, beautiful visuals, and a legitimately new twist on a story as old as the hills.
If there's any small criticism I have of this film, it's that a couple times there are characters that appear suddenly, do something, and then vanish, only to reappear later. There is no explanation of these characters, sometimes not even a name. I don't mind the lack to linear reality, but I did find myself asking questions about how these individuals fit into the greater story, and whether explanatory scenes had been cut. The only other not-positive thing I could say is that the dolphin noises are maybe a little silly.
That's honestly it. I really really enjoyed this movie, and I'm so glad the Calgary Underground Film Festival showed it. It needs more publicity!
In fact, I'm currently very frustrated because I can't find this movie or its soundtrack available anywhere. There's a song in the middle of the film that I'd love to listen to again, the 'Bloody Gloomy' song, and neither the clip nor the audio seem to exist online. Actually, I would love to watch the whole movie again; it's a very rich film, visually, with a lot of attention paid to little details like props and blocking and costumes. Especially as I was reading subtitles, I feel like I could gain a lot from a second viewing. I can only hope a North American distributor picks it up, as I would like to legitimately buy it and support Ms. Smoczynska. Good cinema deserves to be supported!
Which brings me to my last point.
This is actually my first review on IMDb, and I have to admit I'm leaving it partly out of frustration with the only other review for this film. If you don't like musicals, don't go see musicals! And if you see that a movie is classified as a musical, and you don't like musicals, and you go and see the musical anyway, PLEASE don't leave a negative review on the internet just because the MUSICAL that you CHOSE to see had MUSIC in it. That's like giving a horror movie a low score because it was scary! Come on now. You're discouraging people from going to see a perfectly good film because you don't like its genre, rather than any inherent flaw in the film itself. That's hardly fair. I hope people looking this movie up will give it a chance - it deserves much, much higher than a 3. I promise!
