derek-duerden

... as The Wicker Man is my favourite film ever, I must say that my first thought was "why did I not know about this one?".

Having now watched TWT, the answer is pretty obvious - although kudos to them for even attempting the folly of making something that was *always* going to fall short of the original.

To be fair, there are some good bits... a) in isolation the plot would stand up to various lesser Folk Horror outings although there would be no prizes for guessing the ending; b) Honeysuckle Weeks is having lots of fun in the "Britt Ekland" role, and we get to see a lot more of her than in Foyle's War and c) "the laddie" does a pretty good turn as the unknowing idiot, in my view.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of bad acting and poor dialogue on the way, and (sorry) the main character doesn't convince as a charismatic country star... she might be able to sing (I wasn't sure whether she was dubbed or not?) but she certainly can't move with any rhythm - which any music performer would do naturally - she just looks stiff and awkward much of the time. This was a fundamental flaw for me.

Not good.

I can see from all the comments here that this is pretty divisive but, for me, it fell quite a way on the good side of the love it/hate it border.

Like Parthenope (which I saw also this week), the cinematography is great; however, where Parthenope I felt also was plotless and ultimately boring, here I was quite taken with her situation, and particularly the monsters, even if the plot was a bit convoluted and unconvincing.

I'd go for "moody sci-fi" rather than any kind of "horror", I think, if I were pressed to categorise it - and for me it worked better than (for example) "Vesper" in being a bit different.

Recommended.

IMHO there's a fair amount of commonality with "Slovenian Girl", although the type of naivety on show here is rather different, as Laura here is clearly supposed to be very intelligent in the conventional sense. She shares though the distinct air of not even pretending to give the guys a good time - which one would have thought was part of the "job", no matter how distasteful, exploitative, or unfair. In filmic terms, there's also an undramatic conclusion to both movies.

Where this is less convincing, however, was the financial aspect - quite apart from whether it is (was?) indeed possible for a student to survive in Paris given fees, bills and rent, even with a part-time job - once she *did* start earning money from prostitution it felt as if she was spending too much of the extra cash on inessentials, thus not fixing the original problem. Maybe the book makes this clearer, but if the underlying mission is to elicit sympathy for her position then this in my view was a missed opportunity.

Not a bad film, but not a comfortable watch.