Olga Musayev

Great acting from *most* of the cast, and very atmospheric, but completely ruined by the plot. Fully incoherent. What frustrates me is the dozens of clues/details that are thrown out without going anywhere. For instance: **Spoilers ahead** 1. Longlegs sings, "if you let me in, it will be nice, but if you make me go, I'll come back, not once, not twice, but as often as I like." So the family needs to let him in, right? That's why the mother needs to bring the dolls? Wrong! The Harkers don't let him in, so he just breaks in and ties the mother up. And the other families do let him in, and they all die anyway. So it makes absolutely no difference whether he is "invited." 2. The dolls are needed for mind control. They look like the daughters and have a clear connection to them on two occasions (main character and the institutionalized one). So the daughters do the killings under the dolls' influence? Wrong! It's always the fathers. It makes absolutely no difference whether the daughters are mind controlled. 3. The main character has a psychic connection to the devil. So she is doing the devil's work inadvertently? Nope! Nothing she does advances the murder plot. It's always her mother. 4. Longlegs writes coded letters. The letters are never explained, but they each make reference to a particular farm house. So the farmhouse is the origin of the murders? No! It's just one of sites a doll is buried. 5. Lee is told by Longlegs to let everyone know how she got the letter -- or else her mother will die! She never does do, but Longlegs never kills the mother. That letter served no purpose. 6. During the interrogation, Longlegs says something like, "each child is given the choice to accept the gift and die or reject it and bow down." But none of Lee or the other kids are given that choice. They have absolutely no control over accepting the gift. There are many other holes and dead ends like these. I got the feeling that the writers just did not care about this movie and threw in a bunch of elements (dolls! psychic powers! satanic codes!) with a random name and look, and trusted that the audience would not notice. We notice!

This movie is about the banality of evil. That's it. If you read Arendt, or even the last sentence, you basically get the point. Rather than develop this theme, the film just beats you over the head with it for 1hr 45 of banal Nazi daily life-ism. In the process, the film dehumanizes the actual victims, choosing to show none of them and only include some vague and distant screaming, while focusing entirely on perpetrators and their dull interests. I felt disgust for almost two hours and left with no other thought, insight, or impression.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, but Gen Z and stupid. It chooses to make the rich people the "good" if troubled guys, and the middle class kids sinister, manipulative, and full of envy. Felix in particular is shown as a completely good guy with scarcely a bad trait in sight. But every character who needs to work for a long is shown in a negative light. There's no depth or character development here. I wish I could have my two plus hours back. **Spoilers** The plot makes no sense. Oliver's motivation is that he is supposed to love Felix, but when he is about to be kicked out, he kills him? So he was after Saltburn this whole time after all? Or did he kill out of jealousy and anger? If the latter, he didn't have a plan going in and was just improvising. So the whole ending sequence is absurd.