Keith D

The acting I would give 5 stars. Just making that clear before I explain the overall 2 Stars I gave the film. My problems are, as a film this fails. A film is a story. Stories need a beginning a middle, and an end... the main character should experience some sort of growth or change throughout the narrative. As we follow Brie's character we realize by the end of the film she is not new to this mental illness and the clinic personnel seems to indicate that she has been there before. The journey we are taken on is hard to watch and feels, at times, like we are in a bad dream we just want to wake up from. Maybe this successfully illustrates what having an intense illness like this would be like.... but at the end of the day this is a story, not a nightmare, and we need to see the story going somewhere... as it stands I wanted to turn it off near halfway through as I felt extremely uncomfortable with where it was going. I kept watching as they seemed to hint there may in fact be something paranormal happening.... but that tease is carried to the very end with no fulfillment of the story at all. If I may draw an odd parallel... this ending really feels like Monty Python & the Holy Grail where they break the 4th wall and have the actors get arrested on the set as police vehicles roll up on the production and arrest the cast, leaving the ending completely unfinished as if the last script page was suddenly torn out and left unfilmed. I left this viewing far more frustrated than I was when it began.

I had high Hope's for this film.... Don't get me wrong, the acting is top notch, the setting is completely believable, and the concept has a cool and comfy retro feel like a classic 50s sci fi thriller.... But... I found myself looking at the clock, 32 minutes into the film, wondering when the plot was going to move forward. As it is, the first 20 minutes are spent following around the two main characters and they walk around and interact with many different townsfolk at a high school game. The next 10 minutes are spent at a telephone operator station interacting with different callers getting cut off or disconnecting. This entire film feels like it could have been told in 22 minutes between the commercials of a half hour episodic tv series. The other reviewers describe elaborate beautiful tracking shots, startling cinematography, and other film buff buzzwords and phrases.... and while yes, those are there, that seems to be all this film is. By the time anything noteworthy or interesting happened, I found myself dozing off to be honest. The filmmaker has a future in the industry for certain, but I feel that less script in the first half hour could have got the story started faster and given the viewer a reason to keep watching. At the end of the movie I felt like I just watched the pilot episode of a series that will never be made.... all character building, a tease of a story, then end credits.