Starts off well enough, and in a very Haneke-esque early "twist" things get serious quickly. Well, it was a bit too much like "Funny Games" in the setup for me, so it already was lacking some originality.
The acting is good, but the script just wasn't believable. Sure, I get that there was some major abuse of boys at these old camps/schools for wayward or orphaned youths, but the level of both the revenge motive and the violence that one of the main characters is willing to engage in was completely unrealistic and I couldn't suspend my disbelief any longer after a certain reveal. It just got stupid at that point. That kind of person would be in a prison for other serious crimes and not roaming the countryside much less by some miraculous chance running into one of the former teachers aides who wasn't directly involved in his trauma to begin with. Meh, sorry couldn't buy that.
All said and done, it was professionally produced, the soundtrack/score are good and the acting, again, was very good by the mains. It was just too far a bridge to cross for me and I've seen too many films that do the festering revenge thing much better than this screenplay did. 5/10.
The acting is good, but the script just wasn't believable. Sure, I get that there was some major abuse of boys at these old camps/schools for wayward or orphaned youths, but the level of both the revenge motive and the violence that one of the main characters is willing to engage in was completely unrealistic and I couldn't suspend my disbelief any longer after a certain reveal. It just got stupid at that point. That kind of person would be in a prison for other serious crimes and not roaming the countryside much less by some miraculous chance running into one of the former teachers aides who wasn't directly involved in his trauma to begin with. Meh, sorry couldn't buy that.
All said and done, it was professionally produced, the soundtrack/score are good and the acting, again, was very good by the mains. It was just too far a bridge to cross for me and I've seen too many films that do the festering revenge thing much better than this screenplay did. 5/10.