First of all I like to state that I'm a huge Andrey Zvyagintsev fan. Since his debut with Vozvrashchenie in 2003, on which he rightfully won the Golden Lion on the Venice Film Festival and with it's his followup movies The Banishment (2007), Elena (2011) and Leviathan (2014) nothing seems to be able to harm Zvyagintsev's brilliance in movie-making. Until now. Loveless is truly an overrated movie which is way to long, the story itself could have easily been told in 90 minutes instead of more then two hours. Sometimes long movies contribute with characters to develop, but in this movie the characters remains shallow, the boy that disappears has no depth in his character role what so ever so it's very hard to feel the "pain" of his disappearance. And also because the main two actors, husband and wives, show lack of depth in character it's pretty hard to get some kind of connection with the actors. But then you also have this tedious and most terrible aspect of this movie: quality of acting, or rather, a lack of acting quality. The only thing you see from the this wife character is anger, frustrations, as well when looking at her husband. You only see anger and frustration and fear, fear of how colloquies would react on work when he would state that he has been divorced. Literally everything in this scenario points out towards the same direction: the parents are all egocentric, self-indulgent angry people who have only interest in themselves or in the maybe consequences when divorce is imminent.
The victim is without a doubt the child.
It's so one sided and lacks so much nuances that the characters are becoming, for me at least, a characterization of the evil self destructing ego. A stereotype you might state of the egocentric side of humans. But life itself is anything but one dimensional and because of the one dimensional characters in this movie makes this movie hard to watch, let alone a movie to take seriously. A pity, because I'm a real fan of Andrey Zvyagintsev, I've got all of his movies but I'm not eager to add this one to my movie collection.
The victim is without a doubt the child.
It's so one sided and lacks so much nuances that the characters are becoming, for me at least, a characterization of the evil self destructing ego. A stereotype you might state of the egocentric side of humans. But life itself is anything but one dimensional and because of the one dimensional characters in this movie makes this movie hard to watch, let alone a movie to take seriously. A pity, because I'm a real fan of Andrey Zvyagintsev, I've got all of his movies but I'm not eager to add this one to my movie collection.