This movie is what happens when an "arty" film-maker comes up with a few original images/scenes but can't be bothered to develop them into a story.
Can't be bothered or is incapable of it? Probably the latter.
When you give the audience too much information you treat them like children hence make things boring. When you give them too little information you treat them like fortune-telling mind-reading deities. It is hence essential to take a moderate middle ground, the extent of which depends on the genre, the story and the themes.
It is this arthouse treatment of audiences as geniuses that can predict the future and that know everything that appeals to hipsters and film students: hence why they pretend to be fans of such movies. Because they want to convince everyone that they are "the chosen few". Ever hear of virtue-signaling? Well, hipsters praising such movies is genius-signaling. Just as virtue-signalers nearly all lack virtue, genius-signalers lack intelligence.
From the word go it was abundantly clear that this "puzzle movie" wouldn't be a puzzle so much as a plot-free 5-minute short film stretched into 80 minutes. Because Lucille made it, and because it's a French film. It's not unlike "Amer" and a host of other European-made hipster "arthouse" films that make almost zero sense, lack a story, ultimately even failing to make a point - which is ironic because pseudo-intellectuals thrive on "profundity", or at least their own personal hallucinations of it. (Bolivian mushrooms are never far from their reach.) There is no point to be had here. Whatever "meaning" your brain ekes out of this cinematic nonsense is purely in your own head, a figment of your own imagination. Fill-in-the-gaps-cinema this is (Yoda agrees), which mistakenly gets confused with "profoundly intelligent cinema". Some film-goers struggle to tell the difference, which is fortunate for the likes of Lucille who capitalizes on their intellectual confusion. She builds an entire career on these people, so their confusion is paramount to her. Kinda like Picasso. After all, he was a pioneer of this approach.
It's stylish alright, I'll give it that. Certainly much improvement for Lucille whose previous boring/pointless movie "Innocence" didn't impress on that front. However, for yin to have its yang, style needs to have its substance. Otherwise the result is a half-baked attempt at a masterpiece. Not that this would have been a masterpiece even with a proper story (or just A story), because I am fairly certain that Lucille would have cobbled together a rather lame script full of logic holes. Writing isn't her forte, mildly put, as is the case with numerous writer/directors of this "me me me" era. An era in which film-makers feel they should be doing everything, just so lame movie critics can refer to them as "auteurs" - a word that gets Lucille and her writer/directing colleagues wet. Hey, Ed Wood wanted to do everything himself too...
The basic "premise", If we can call it that, is not bad at all. A mysterious island or coast town, located somewhere in Greece, Portugal or Spain by the looks of it, in which only two demographics reside: young women and 11 year-old boys. So far so not bad at all, an intriguing set-up. But also a set-up that would be very difficult to rationalize, which is why I accurately predicted that this was a non-plot movie, or at the very least a no-explanations-given flick. I decided to stick it out anyway, because the movie is mercifully short, because the coast-line scenes are awesome, and because I was curious which perversions the French have in store for us this time. Well... Lucille isn't French but the movie is.
Young boys and young women. Would Lucille actually dare...? Yes, she would, and she did. There is a scene in which the mouths of the male and female protagonists connect, for very long, underwater. A young boy and an adult woman. Yes, French cinema is awash with sex with minors, so am I surprised? Not at all, especially not with this demographic set-up. Of course, Lucille cleverly conceives the scene, in such a way as to suggest that they aren't kissing but she is giving the boy oxygen.
Why? Is she a fish? Sort of, yes. In fact, these women are aliens, or at the very least advanced octopus-human hybrids. Not satisfied with having conquered both land and sea (how why or when - we are never told), these octopoossies spend their time conducting sadistic experiments on young abducted boys. This gang of mollusk Mengeles actually impregnate the boys with various strange creatures. You know how they say "you can tell a man wrote this"... Well, you can tell a woman wrote this... nonsense. It reeks of barely restrained extremist feminism. Only a twisted mind infected with lush doses of Cultural Marxism can actually come up with this "concept", then decide to actually film it. The male pregnancy theme is similar to that of Romola's in "Amulet", which is another recent feminist horror film. But at least that movie has a story.
There is also a scene in which the boy protagonist witnesses the octos during what appears to be a lesbian night orgy. Lucille must be enamored by the Amazon women myth, and is projecting her own sexual fantasies, perhaps?
So yeah, people who complain about perversion are not making anything up. This is yet another filthy Euro-trashy bundle of "pervert's delight" masked as an art film. Because decades ago, several psychopath film-makers realized that you can get away with almost anything as long as you wrap it all up in arty foliage. Kind of the way a modern photographer opens a gallery featuring naked 10 year-old girls on the guise of "Childhood Angst" or some such malarkey, when he perfectly knows that the exhibition will be a huge hit among the numerous pervs. Young boys being ritually abused by adult women is at the very least borderline unacceptable. The movie gets away with it to some extent because it is stylish and so extremely vague.
How about if we reversed this? A remote village in which adult males hold abducted 10 year-old girls captive, conducting medical experiments on them to implant male genitals on them. How would this fly? It wouldn't. It wouldn't even get financed, let alone released. And rightly so. But hey, grrl power. Under the guise of "gender rights" the Left is getting away with murder these days. This movie seems to me like nothing more than a deranged feminist fantasy, a sort of subliminal revenge statement. Revenge for what though? Either that or an LGBT-inspired attempt to champion androgyny and sexual ambiguousness, something that the most extreme wing of the leftist western media has been trying to push in recent years. MTV is ample proof of it.
OK, I am merely guessing at this point. After all, how am I supposed to know what octos want and why! Lucille tells us almost nothing.
Check out my "Horror Films Ranked, Rated & Reviewed" list, it has over 1000 entries.
8 out of 21 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
