Most Beautiful Island

An undocumented immigrant in Manhattan attempts to make some quick cash when her friend invites her to get paid to beautify a party.

Drawn out as it follows her throughout the day, her multiple jobs, her landlord's threats, and one ice cream shopping trip not to be forgotten we spend more time getting her to the party than there. The anxiety builds throughout, because isn't just about the party so much as the circumstances that make the desperate decisions made there by all the women involved completely understandable.

The intimacy of the view of this woman's life is the best part of the film. People going for a straight horror/thriller film (as this was labeled when I watched it) are probably going to be a bit put off, but there is certainly the more mundane type of horror in abundance.

Can't say I loved the film (the ending feels a bit out of place and hokey in comparison to the lead-up), but given that this is Ana Asensio's first writer and director credits I have to say I am deeply impressed. This is a director that I'm going to keep an eye out for in the future.

Most Beautiful Island was extremely well-received at Austin's SXSW Film Festival where it won Grand Jury Award for Narrative Feature. This eloquent film explores the experiences of Luciana, a recent undocumented immigrant, who has recently arrived from her home land and is just trying to get by in New York. The film focuses on a single day as she takes various odd jobs and then gets invited to work at a mysterious party where she will be extremely well-paid for a single night's work. The suspense builds towards a truly shocking and deeply disturbing climax. This film shows the truly dark side of the American Dream and the truly disturbing nature of class privilege in a society with huge gaps in class and, therefore, power and privilege.

The story is described as inspired by true events so there may be some exaggeration in the actual climax, but it is still quite powerful and leaves the audience awestruck. Ana Asensio directed, wrote and stars in this fascinating and absorbing film. It is beautiful written, filmed and acted. The tension builds towards the disturbing climax. The American Dream is not always what it seems to be and needs to be re-imagined for our current economic and political realities. I hope the film gets distributed so more people can learn to empathize with the immigrant experience which has sadly become a political punching bag in recent years.

If you watch the last 15-20 minutes of the movie you watch it all. The rest of it just seems stretched. In the beginning there is a scene where there are many cockroaches entering through a wall. I thought it was meant to give a horror turn but it turned out to be nothing. If its just meant to be the story of hardships faced by an immigrant and what all things they sign up for then it could have meant something but tagging it under horror mystery doesn't make much sense.

Very slow buildup - should have been an episode of the Dark Mirror or a horror anthology not a full movie as there is no character development or any real story development.

The end though does hold some suspense and has an interesting denouement but its only an average movie to pass your time and it won't set your world alight.

(2017) Most Beautiful Island PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER

Again, because imdb does not give users the ability to give 1/2 stars, this movie to me is like a bare pass, for it belongs to a 25 stint episode of the Twilight Zone than as a featured film. And it is better to be watched at home so that way, the viewer can view the movie with the fast forward button while playing with a remote control button at hand, part of the reason I am giving this movie a pass.

Co-produced, written, directed and starring Ana Asensio directing a no plot movie as she plays Luciana struggling to make ends meet while living in NYC, struggling in terms of making money. She has just moved there as an immigrant as she is attempting to make a new life for herself after losing a daughter. She has two jobs both are low paying jobs, one is to hand out leaflets for a fry chicken establishment, and the other one is working kind of as a babysitter. And by the time she comes back to her run down apartment she looks to have share with another former tenant, with indications of sticky notes to remind her to pay and so forth, she does decide to take a bath (this scene is key) as there's a scene where she removes duct tape, stuck onto a wall and she lets out a bunch of cockroaches into the bathwater she was bathing in without flinching. By the time she meets Olga, her co-worker for handing out leaflets to passerby's on the street for this fry chicken place, and after work making general conversation, she asks Luciana if she was wiling to take her place to make some quick cash of two thousand dollars, which consists of just standing around and posing for a group of people. And by the time Luciana manages to arrive, that it is not what she thought it was as there was a reason why immigrants like her are used.

As I said at the outset, one would need to use the fast forward button to move the movie along which can be frustrating to viewers watching it straight through as a good percentage of the movie is nothing more but showcases Luciana's money struggles, viewers so much do not need to know so much of the details. That is why I am giving this a pass which if I were to watch this at the theater, I'd clearly give this movie a thumbs down.