Metacritic-Rezensionen

Pacifiction draws you in with its sense of mystery and surrealism and leaves you ultimately agog.

A gorgeous and grave anti-epic, Pacifiction proceeds in scenes that serve as pristine containers for Serra’s idiosyncratic style, slow and digressive, full of flabby jokes and windy talk. It’s like watching a tropical aquarium slowly fill with algae.

Pacifiction is not a vicarious experience of luxury; it is an experience of life. Set to its own tidal rhythm, it is one of the most beautiful and rigorously introspective movies of this or any year, a film that makes you deeply ponder the fate of humanity itself.

Pacifiction uses its thin narrative elements as a pretense to explore the texture of uncertainty, suspicion, and inaction.

Albert Serra’s bizarre epic is a cheese-dream of French imperial tristesse, political paranoia and an apocalyptic despair. It is a nightmare that moves as slowly and confidently as a somnambulist, and its pace, length, and Serra’s beautiful widescreen panoramic framings – in which conventional drama is almost camouflaged or lost – may divide opinion. I can only say I was captivated by the film and its stealthy evocation of pure evil.

It suggests John le Carré by way of David Lynch — a feverish and haunting but also wry and meditative rumination on power, secrecy and the color of clouds over water at sunset.

For resilient audiences, it provides a truly original cinematic experience. ‘Cinematic’ is a key word: the film was lavishly shot using three 4K Canon Black Magic Pocket cameras and comes with a rich soundscape that pushes the oneiric envelope and takes certain scenes into paranoid-thriller genre territory.

Pacifiction is a film in many ways about floating, through life and water and power, inviting the viewer to idly drift right along with it.

Quite watchable, even sort of plot-driven — for a Serra film.

This isn’t a story, but an evocative collection of asked-and-answered prompts. You buy a ticket to Pacifiction and then you react, until the nudging stops.