Reviews

Thought the trailer didn't look too cheesy so I took a chance. Now I wish I hadn't. Little more than an hour long but boring, and slow, and just not involving. Thought it started out pretty good (given that the lead actor is terrible) but once it got going it went nowhere and made sure you didn't care. Unbelievable characters stumbling over lines. Absolutely stupid behavior necessary to advance the plot - and not just the usual horror movie stupid like walking outside alone when you know there's a killer, this is next level stupid, like letting strangers decide what actions the FBI should take etc. Plot makes no sense. How it's developed makes no sense. Characters make no sense. I wish it would have sucked from the outset so I would have turned it off instead of thinking, "it's only an hour - give it a chance". I gave it a chance. You don't have to. It's the worst kind of bad because its not trashy enough, or even weird enough, that someone might like it anyway. It's just flat, and dull and not worth your time.

Okay, so there's nothing new here, or particularly original, but from the get go at least there are characters on display and they are behaving believably. Makes you a little more vested in the situation as it unfolds. I don't know that the flashback structure of it helped any, but what most folks want to know is "was it scary?" or "was it stupid?" For my tastes it was involving enough, with a few creepy vibes but nothing really exceptional. I could have done without the lazy go to of repeated nightmares in order to have something unnerving happen. Make the shocks part of the story! Make them part of the situation! We lose investment if we expect every unusual occurrence to just be a harmless dream. But that being said, at least it wasn't stupid the rest of the time and I never had the urge to fast forward thru it. Entirely acceptable. But I doubt I'll ever watch it again. There needs to be an option with the streaming services between "liked" and "disliked".

I gotta say at the top I didn't finish, and I can suspend disbelief if the film's style warrants a "check your brain at the door", but if you're making a realistic thriller and you show a kidnap victim resilient enough to overpower her single captor four or five times and she NEVER TAKES HIS GUN OUT OF THE EQUATION, or binds him, or cripples him, but just waits for him to recover and pick up his gun again, I'm sorry, I check out. Good acting up to that point and I guess there's a reason they didn't let us know anything about the characters first, but stupid staging is stupid and I can't sit for that.

Filmed in Iceland and undoubtedly an Art film I expected it to have long lingering shots and be heavier on atmosphere than plot, but at the end of the day there was so little story that it basically kept repeating itself. Nice landscape not particularly captured well. Bjork was awesome but the other sister was wooden and unimpressive. The little boy was good, the father kind of tolerable. For a Grimm's fairy tale about witches it had the feel of neither type of film. I stuck it out but it shouldn't have been an effort, and it was. Needed a better script, something fleshed out.

Filmmakers wanted to show how stylishly they could light shots and how cleverly they could film scenes. And they did a good job with that. When they wanted to show how stylishly they could define a near future world or tell a compelling story, not so much. Candy for the eyes, stale cream of wheat for the brain. Kind of a waste of some excellent actors doing good work.

Not a bad movie but not a particularly good one either. Held my interest but was slow and hard to follow in some places. Will watch anything with Kurt Russell. Lead's acting was strong during the family stuff, but weaker in many other scenes. Suspect I will have forgotten about it by tomorrow but on the other hand I never turned it off or threw anything at the screen. I was expecting a smarter thriller like Shattered Glass so that didn't help. At least it wasn't super dumb.

Short and sweet; I love me my Korean thrillers. This was a good one. Great for the first hour, had no idea where it was going. The last hour became a little more convoluted than it needed to be. Common in these films to keep layering on the connected relationships but the last hour just wasn't as strong as the set-up. Def worth watching.