Causality (2021) User Reviews

Initial intrigue turns to tedium

[grantss · 4/10 · 17 January 2022]

The initial setup for this movie is intriguing - a woman kidnapped but by whom and to what end? However the writer and director squander this solid base with a plot that is random and unfocussed. The film just drifts throughout and what plot development there is doesn't make much sense.

As for the this being lauded for being shot in a single sequence, if that's the best thing about the movie clearly there's not much else to it.

Find out

[kosmasp · 6/10 · 10 September 2022]

No pun intended - the movie tells a quite intriguing story. And yet it seems to focus more on the technical aspect of it (all being shot in one take - at least that is what it tells us). I did not check if that is true - nowadays you can make things look like they are being done in one long take, while you edit and cut at certain places.

Again I do not think it is that important. It looks good for sure, but the movie may annoy you with the whole who did that and why did they do it. We also have a few red herrings - and may guess wrong a few times. Just to get a resolution that is quite ... well out there. The ending itself either is able to save the whole thing (again no pun intended) or kill it off (another pun?) ... it is going to depend on how you feel about the twist ... and the story ... who is likeable and who has earned the audiences sympathy you ask? That's a good one.

who is this WHO guy?

[elia_b · 13 February 2022]

Pretty god thriller, but quite tiresome to watch because of single sequence shot with no cuts. Anyway i guess it required a very smart plan and a lot of preparation to make possible the single shot thing.

Ps. I didn't understand why Claudia couldn't cry louder for help or why the police didn't come faster when called.

Maybe written by a 5th grader

[zendyude · 1/10 · 10 January 2022]

Except for the wow factor of a single camera take, everything else is terrible and dumb. The plot is just all over the place and was so dumb, I thought I lost brain cells. Halfway through, I watched it on fast forward and even then it was dumb.

Not a single sequence for sure

[osmiobr · 7/10 · 17 April 2022]

Mostly one shot but unless you can get a camera to go through glass without breaking it does get cuts. Note the comes and goes from the "old surgery room". I am sure if you look closer other scenes without people on them were bridge for other cuts but it does give you the ilusion of one single shot. If you are more patient than I you may time the "timer" on the wall and see if it matches the actual time gap. In summary, so much potential for a great end but the story very much dissapointed me.

One of the worst movies I have ever seen

[ramey-39255 · 1/10 · 28 January 2022]

The plot is ridiculous and unbelievable and the acting is even worse. The plot drags on and on and makes no sense. Don't waste your time watching this.

Something different

[shjoOona · 7/10 · 27 January 2022]

This movie caught me by the way it uses the camera, the mystery to find out who is the criminal and why, what, How..etc.

Then came the twist to make things even better.

Absolute garbage

[chrissievalentine · 1/10 · 14 January 2022]

After reading the reviews, I put this film on. I found myself hanging on in hope that it improved. It doesn't.

Just don't make the same mistake... Lots of repetitive shouting is about all I can say about it.

surprising good

[brumms78 · 7/10 · 28 December 2021]

Expected a very low budget film with bad acting.

Got a moderate low budget film with pretty good acting.

The story and acting kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time and I really had no idea how it was going to turn out.

Would recommend it to anyone who enjoys b movie thrillers.

7.1.

Toilet

[jdaniels-237-950159 · 1/10 · 6 March 2022]

This film is worse than crap if that's even possible. If you want to be bored to death and you have a garden with some grass growing, go out and watch the grass growing, it's more exciting.

Gripping thriller done in one single shot.

[dawidskrodzki · 8/10 · 25 January 2022]

First of all let me just say that I am baffled by anyone giving it 1/10. I have no idea what those people have seen but it certainly wasn't this movie. Depending on your taste in movies I can understand people rating somewhere between 6 and 10. But ratings lower than that seem to come from people that truly hated this on a personal level, for god knows what reason.

The only thing I can think of that would cause people to really dislike Causality is their short attention spans. They seem to struggle to focus on anything that doesn't have some action, care chases, fights, etc. Every five minutes. In a addition they seem to get lost when the storyline is not simple to follow.

When I normally see very polarizing reviews on IMDB, I know I am in for a treat. Most of the time one of the main reasons for this huge divide is that some people just cannot handle slow, atmospheric movies. This movie seems to be no different.

If it comes to the movie itself it is certainly not perfect. But it is a great thriller nonetheless. I love the fact that for the first half of it I was confused about what is actually going on and who are the main protagonists. And this is clearly done on purpose. The best part is that at the end everything makes sense.

The direction was excellent as was acting. It's worth noting that the whole movie was done in one single shot. And this is not just a gimmick as it makes the whole experience very immersive.

All in all a solid 8/10 from me. I was considering giving it 10/10 just to offset those ridiculous 1/10 but I decided to be better than this.

So this is what happens

[nicolaiox-37789 · 1/10 · 24 June 2023]

A woman is waiting for an internet date to arrive at a bar and after and hour she contacts him to say she's leaving. A homeless man comes by and takes her picture distracting her while someone else puts a date rape drug in her drink. I should mention that every year for the last 10 years someone calls her phone on November 27th and doesn't say anything and today is November 27th. After the woman walks away she passes out and the homeless man puts her in his shopping cart and takes her to a hospital down the block. They picked the bar because it was on the corner of the hospital. For 1 1/2 hours you see a cast of about 8 in this dilapidated hospital get up to weird stuff like security guards yelling at nurses and just stupid things. The woman who the homeless man brought in disappears because someone is scrubs puts a wig and shawl on her and takes her. For 1 1/2 hours this nurse is looking for her with no help from security. We find the woman chained to a chair and restrained. She breaks out of the arm and leg restraints but has a chain around her ankle so she can't leave. She finds a draw with pictures of herself, one Polaroid for every year on the 27th of November. The woman stabs a doctor who she thinks locked her up and then another man goes into the room and asks her what she did. Then a timer goes off and we see a video of the woman knocking a woman down with her car and leaving the scene of the accident. That woman was the wife of the man that captured her . His wife was pregnant. The man the woman stabbed was a Doctor who the wife was brought to after the accident but he was drunk and didn't save her. So the plan was to kill both these people. When security guards arrive the man holds the woman's hands (she is holding a scissor) and screams that she is trying to kill him like the Doctor on the floor and the security shoots her dead. Such a waste of two hours.

Don't bother

[nicola-64921 · 1/10 · 1 February 2022]

What a load of rubbish, an hour and a half I'll never get back. Acting is appalling. How it got a higher rating I'll never know. The worst film I've ever seen.

Painful to watch

[prdood01 · 1/10 · 1 February 2022]

This is two hours of my life I will never get back, unfortunately. No effort is made to suspend disbelief. The plot is somewhere between absent and disorganized. You can't really call this a thriller. It creates no suspense, surprise, or coherent story-line.

An Eye for an Eye

[lavatch · 3/10 · 27 April 2023]

As an exercise in filmmaking, "Causality" superficially explored a cinéma vérité style. The action was filmed in a single shot, and the hand-held camera offered the immediacy of realistic human behavior.

But the overall impact of the film was disappointing in the lack of credibility. It was too big of a stretch to believe that so much violence could occur in a large, metropolitan hospital. Only one of the workers seemed to care about the patients.

The theme of lex talionis (an eye for an eye) was intriguing. But in what was to be a purely realistic experience stylistically, the slow-paced film did not fulfill its desired effect to draw the viewer into a disturbing human experience.

What a waste...

[awilife · 2/10 · 25 August 2022]

Totally unbelievable, acting poor, unrealistic all throughout the movie. Claudia the main character is the only good actor in the film, too bad she dies in the end. Silly ending. Made for tv movie. Not worth watching.

Compelling experimental thriller

[hof-4 · 8/10 · 5 February 2022]

As the movie opens Claudia, a handsome fortyish woman is sitting at a sidewalk cafe having a drink and texting her prospective date Luis, a doctor she contacted through the social media. Luis repeatedly announces he will be late and finally doesn't show up. Claudia leaves the bar and is shortly after seen unconscious on the entrance steps of a hospital. She is admitted with symptoms that may indicate excessive alcohol consumption or something worse. She is attended to by the head nurse of the night shift, Romina, who brings her back from her faint and later loses track of her. The rest of the action is within the limits of the hospital and its entrance.

The movie has been shot in one single take, no cuts, so that everything happens in real time. We are invisible witnesses to the action in the hospital and.what we see (or hear from snatches of conversation, or guess from gestures) is what we get. For most of the time we follow Romina in her wanderings through the labyrinthine, dimly lit corridors of the hospital that has a dark, temporarily unused wing under repair. We are shown Romina's increasingly tense exchanges with other hospital personnel. At the end, an unexpected discovery clarifies some of the happenings, but, as in real life, loose ends remain and we are left to imagine how the remaining facts can be connected.

I found this movie endlessly fascinating and edge/of/you/seat suspenseful. The no cuts format is not a gimmick; it produces a thrilling sense of immediacy to the action. Acting is first rate, especially from Laura Novoa (Romina) who is on screen most of the time. She conveys to perfection her increasing bewilderment (even the neatness of her hairdo is gradually lost). Direction is fluid, music supports the action unobtrusively and the script is perfectly adapted to the tale. The director is identified under the pseudonym "Who", and a little Web search reveals him to be Marcelo Politano, who appears with his own name in the credits as producer and as one of the script writers. Besides Causality, Politano has two movie credits; Soy Tu Karma (I am your Karma, 2017) and Esencial (Essential, 2021). I have not seen either but on the basis of this film I will be waiting for more of his work.

Do Not Miss This

[firoozh · 10/10 · 30 December 2021]

Wow I was surprised to find this film on Amazon randomly. It's a perfect thriller. Nothing needs to be said about it, it's just amazing film making.

The theme is nothing new but the way is made in one sequence makes it worthwhile. I can't even imagine the preparation that gone into making this film.

Intriguing and entertaining

[lucas_isjustme · 8/10 · 4 January 2022]

"Causalidad" is a low budget thriller from Argentina about a woman who is kidnapped after being drugged in a bar. Even if the story doesn't bring anything new to the genre, the film works with good acting and a superb script, plus it was filmed in one sequence without cuts.

It is recommended for those viewers that enjoy a smart story despite a low budget production.