Saw this at the Rotterdam filmfestival (IFFR) 2022, not in a venue but online. I booked this movie after reading controversial and contradicting reviews. I'm not sure it's the best attitude for watching, but I did anyway. In retrospect, I'm surprised I made it until the end.
I'm a bit bothered by the all-female squad hunting women "deviating from the right path", without having any clue (at least, I did not see any) how to identify such deviators. Was it sufficient for a woman to walk alone at night, thereby assuming no proper woman has any business alone at that hour. If that was the case, the black&white division of good and bad is dangerous in the hands of uncontrolled gangs, be it men or women for that matter, usually not asking questions but merely assume, judge and strike.
The story as it enrolls does not show a natural flow and misses logical developments carrying us from A to B, then to C, and so on. We constantly see two alternating lives, one among co-believers and one other in a professional setting. The latter story starts in a hospital for plastic surgery, but our main protagonist (MP) moves to a hospital nursing comateuse people later. After she was wounded in her face yielding a very visible scar, she was dismissed by the plastic surgery hospital for fear of upsetting patients there. Her job move was deliberate: comateuse patients do not care how a nurse looks.
Due to the genre labels by IMDB, I could not help myself thinking of night shifts, being nearly alone among all those dormant coma-patients. Added to that, mostly in the company of one colleague (male) nurse, with nothing much to do to pass the time. The filmmakers probably intended to generate all kinds of thoughts with us viewers (and maybe with our MP too, as we get one sex scene, of which I'm not sure it was imagined or real).
The counseling session with the minister/vicar does not help much to keep me and our MP on the right track. However, that may be my non-pure view only, when the vicar lays hands on her but was interrupted in the middle when his presence was needed elsewhere. Maybe, my devious thoughts were not intended by the filmmakers (for me, it looked like a typical #MeToo case in progress).
And what about the surprising ending some reviewers wrote about?? What did I miss?? Or is this just a consequence of the missing narrative, leading us from one scene to another unrelated scene, and eventually to nowhere?? The alternating scenes (the street gangs, hospital, pseudo-religuous sessions, and so on) made me persist until the end, persistently longing for something relevant or interesting to happen. But I waited in vain. That I saw the ending was a miracle in itself, if I may be so bold in retrospect, usually having it switched off earlier.
All in all, I have not enough substance to write a conclusion. I scored a 2 out of 5 for the audience award, for the sole reason that the movie I saw before this one, was worse and did not deserve more than 1 out of 5.
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