Upurga

I am so glad to have caught a little thriller - more than horror - film from Estonia. So glad. OK, it brings nothing to this found footage flick; when you have seen CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST or BLAIRWITCH... and many other rip-offs, you can't get surprised, but you still can be excited, entertained. Plus it is a survival that will make any movie buff think about John Boorman's DELIVERANCE. And, again, many other horror films were the same. I am thru with American horror films, they are more or less all the same, predictable at the most, unlike the European ones, for instance. So, yes, this one is really worth watching if you crave for this kind of film. And remember, you have here more a thriller than a true horror yarn.

This is one of those completely underrated films that you watch without any expectations and it ends up being a surprise, a good surprise. "Upurga", Latvian for "victim", is a very well-directed thriller. Despite being a simple film, Ugis Olte manages to construct a narrative that combines fable and cinematography in an "almost" great film, as I wrote in the title. It reminds a bit "The Blair Witch Project" or "Under The Skin". In fact, the film has a chain that generates a permanent feeling of continuity until the end and despite having a convincing ending, it seems like it could continue as if it were a series. It is interesting to see the difference in the dramaturgy of a little-known country like Latvia, both in the script, direction and acting, subtly different from the pasteurized cinema of the West but without the idiosyncrasies and corniness of more oriental works such as Korean or Arab ones. It's worth watching.

A bunch of young people go into a forest/river area, to film an adventure video with a vegan sausage somehow shoehorned into it. Everybody communicates as if it was their first time among other people. There's some mysterious flower blooming in the forest, that seemingly makes these people even weirder, a nut of a "sheriff" who tells you, that you can't urinate in "his" forest..so apparently the answer to a lifelong question "does the bear $h1t in the woods" - is a "No!", at least in this particular location. Who knew. There's another bunch of strange individuals, conducting some sort of iffy business and some other, cabbage fermenting gentleman and his wife. Two people wear a nose clip of some sort, but nobody else...there's not one normal person in the whole film. The film is a salad of random ideas - inserted - again, at random - minor characters, their stories and dialogues, shots, that add absolutely nothing.

There seems to be this trend, of making movies, especially "horror" movies, without any real conclusion, or even if it has some sort of ending, they don't show you, how it got there.

It's not as cute, as they think it is. Quite the opposite.

Imagine watching Star Wars where there would be no spaceships, no lightsabers etc shown. They would tell you - "yeah, so we travel between galaxies and stuff and we fight, but we won't show you how. Just imagine it, or whatever - and do our work for us - in your mind, it's cheaper that way and we don't have any ideas anyway."

Yeah, it wouldn't work very well, would it?

Almost everything would be half passable, meh acting, but it's low budget, so you expect that, even the non-ending would hurt way less, if it wasn't for the unbearable dialogues!

The fact, that non English speakers (maybe the actual actors themselves) dubbed the dialogues into "English", is totally fine, it kind of adds to the character. However, should you really write dialogues in a foreign language just using Google translate? Without having ANY native speaker to at least read through the script, before doing the voice-over.. Because that's exactly how the dialogues sounded. Maybe in Latvian, or whatever the original language was, it all sounded right, but in English it just didn't.

Don't get me wrong - all the words used in the film do exist, I've heard them all before, but never in this order. You know what they're trying to say, probably most of the time, but it's clear, that they've picked the wrong words and made up their own expressions.

I will put it this way - if you watched this movie on mute and without any subtitles, just for the visual, you'd probably get way more out of it. You'd try to imagine, why people act the way they do, you'd try to figure out what they're talking about - and you'd do a much better job, than the filmmakers did.

It is set in a forested river area that doesn't show up in many International films. Andrejs is a wilderness guide, and his job is to guide a small group of people who are intending to film for a commercial on a vegetarian sausage. For them the trip is a lark, and they have little interest in safety or the dangers and soon they disappear. However Andrejs is serious about his job, and he tries to find out what happened. And it seems the forest has other ideas. And in this movie the forest really is the star. But it really comes down to whether the viewer cares as much as Andrejs does. There is a strange flower growing in the forest, which may explain some of what is happening.

Let me start by saying if you are ok with movies where you don't really quite get what happened at the end, then this movie would get a higher rating than I gave it. People in this movie sort of get 'possessed by the forest' for lack of any better way of describing it. A couple of the people that this happens to don't really seem to have any effects beyond just blacking out for a while, but if you go in this certain area of water, you're just messed up. I'm not completely sure what happens at the end...are the characters leaving or are they staying? I've seen worse movies, but I figured this one was going to be really good since it was Latvian and only had subtitles - how many Latvian films do we get to see in America, right? But I was wrong.... I found this mediocre at best.