I don't know about this film. Started out interesting but kind of ended up being just a really formulaic thriller
...a really formulaic thriller by Edgar Wright. In all seriousness, it seems like the film lost a lot of you somewhere halfway through. What exactly was that point for you, if that was the case?
It's hard for me to pinpoint exactly where it lost me, but I'd say around the time when he ghouls start following her around the library is when the cracks started to form. That's when it starts to lose some of the psychological mystery driving the story and begins to feel more like a haunted house type film. It didn't help that the ghoul design looked more corny than terrifying. I was for sure gone at the point Terrance Stamp got hit by the car and the pub owner felt the urge to deliver his condensed back story for the sake of the audience. The dialogue in that scene was borderline comedic but I could feel the movie wanting me to be genuinely shocked by the revelation.
This was very disappointing. Like a half assed attempt at making a Satoshi Kon film And thematically it feels…outdated, to say the least.
also anya taylor-joy’s character’s arc, at least before the twist, is boring boring boring, and after the twist it’s dumb dumb dumb. bad dumb! movie definitely thinks it’s got more going on than it does
Not to combine threads, but this is exactly how I felt about The Last Duel. The twist isn’t without flaws, but I have to say I was never bored and I thought it at least took a swing in a direction that was interesting.
Counterpoint: Sandy’s journey made enough sense to not break the film, but also wasn’t the central arc of the film. Ellie’s was. And, that worked enough for me that, when paired with the performances and general style/vibe, made for an engaging, fun movie experience.
I will also say that - as an Edgar Wright film - I found it lacking in much of his characteristic style. It's almost like Ant-Man in a way. You could point to scenes in that film as having been holdovers from his time as director, because they are jarringly much more interesting than the editorially mandated Marvel stuff. In this film, I look at the opening news paper dress sequence, and I look at the first dream sequence, and I'm like "oh yeah, this is primo Edgar Wright, here we go." And then it basically becomes paint by numbers after that. You can only rely on The Kinks so much.
Every single movie Edgar makes is pretty silly, did you really think this would be any different ? One could blame the marketing, but that’s not really the films fault.
I feel like my biggest complaint of the movie is that it’s very much *not* silly or stylistic in the way his other movies are. As others have said, aside from a small handful of moments, this felt very by-the-book in just about every way, like something I would expect from just about any generic horror/thriller director
Just went and saw a screening of Scott Pilgrim and the CGI in that almost 12-year-old movie is much better than the CGI in this one
This was okay I guess. I got kind of bored though at times. Didn’t really feel like a Wright film to me.
My girlfriend, who is a sexual assault survivor, was incredibly triggered by the last little bit of the film where the sex-trafficking victim becomes the villain of the film and that really fucking sucks because both of us were on board until the twist, which both was pretty easy to guess and just completely fucked with the themes of the film just to serve that obvious twist. It's a shame too because we both really enjoyed the film up until the twist. It was so close to being a good film but it needed a crazy climax I guess.
My girlfriend did make the point that the character in question was trafficked into sex, which is different than being a sex worker. She told me something to the effect that prostitution removes the agency from the worker which is different from sex work where the sex worker in question has agency. Iono, I thought it was relevant to point out. She's about as pro-sex work as it gets so I thought it was interesting that she didn't find that part of the film problematic.
Upon rewatch, her being villainous is really very brief. A moment of weakness out of self preservation & fear. But she regrets it pretty quickly and embraces with Ellie before the end. Having said that, I do still wonder about a version of this with a different 3rd act.
Yeah I personally didn’t see Sandy being a villain at the end at all. In fact, Ellie (and the movie itself) is extremely sympathetic toward her and what she went through. Ellie even basically tells the spirits of the men Sandy killed to go fuck themselves when they ask her for help “avenging” them. I think Sandy just didn’t expect Ellie to be on her side, so when Ellie said she wouldn’t tell anyone, Sandy didn’t believe her and thought she was just saying that to save herself. She had already drugged the tea well before that.