Alia

Jennifer Fox wrote and directed this movie magnificently. The movie started with a warning, and there's a *serious* reason why it did. It's a movie you can't unsee. In my opinion, sexual abuse only took 40% of the entire premise. The main theme was about trauma and memory, what was "rightly remembering" actually means. We were also confronted with the sickening effect of child grooming, as well as an idea that is rarely talked: of how we put the label to the victim.

I have to applaud the consistency of this movie. Whether it's the shots, the dialogue, the narration, the plot, even Celeste's songs, all have one strong theme: it's unnecessarily too long, meant to be sensational and thought-provoking, yet ended up empty and forgotten by the milli-seconds it's over. BRAVO.

It feels like a bad remake of A Monster Calls. The giants felt like a failed metaphor to me, since the true problem of the main character (one that supposedly triggered the metaphor) was hidden from the viewer, without any reason. So rather than a suffering kid, the main character just came out as a bored tween, trying to push everyone and look as weird as possible.

The silly cameos, useless tonal shift and lack of focus made me can't take this movie seriously--all while the movie looks like it wanted to be Dog Day Afternoon+ Network + Margin Call. But in the end, Clooney still must do his heroic stuff, be with Julia Roberts, and live happily ever after. What? "Socio-economic issue"? The writer didn't give a single shite about that--not even ironically.