Jessica Forever

Yes this is a very beautiful movie. Cinematography is superb, artistic design - first class. In fact, all the technical aspects of film making are at their peak. So What!!?? We also get here a confused Christian fable with Jessica a mysterious woman and her twelve orphans. Twelve persecuted, tormented orphans all of whom get to participate in Pieta like scenes over and over again. And that's not all we get, we get loads of pretentious mysticism the idiotic notion that one can equate death with redemption and therefore with love. In other words we get a thematic mumbo jumbo that the director and script writer confused with a story.

It's beautiful, but it's also hollow and pompous and a waste of some obvious talents that did participate in its making.

To start off, I'm not sure exactly why Shudder acquired rights to this film. It's not horror, nor is it something that they'd usually push on their platform, especially as a "Shudder Original". At any rate, this movie is very... French. Super experimental, super weird, and super unrewarding.

The whole premise is supposed to be a dystopian world (which is not at all dystopian, but more like a late 2010s world where absolutely nothing has changed) where these misfit orphans rule the world and "take back what is rightfully theirs" (which never happens at all outside of dialogue). This is an intriguing enough story, and there are so many scenes in this movie that should have enriched it, but with all of the scenes and all of the characters, so little happens. In fact, you could argue that nothing at all happens.

And what does happen include some very weird things including but not limited to: letters on a birthday cake floating around, a dead sister reanimating to play a video game with her brother, a gun floating around a bedroom and speaking through another character, blood randomly covering someone, and someone lighting themselves on fire. And the list goes on.

Now, the writing isn't in itself terrible, but it's just a plot that is severely underutilized and does nothing in the way of storytelling. So maybe the whole point of the film was to show the inherent beauty of meaninglessness and the struggle of being alone, but I personally think that, A) if that was the point, it was done poorly, and B) stories like that aren't always great or enjoyable.

I do like an experimental film here and there, but this one was too grounded in reality for the absurdity to feel like any more than distraction and wasted potential.

There is nothing this movie did well, the synopsis lied to us completely, the characters are as interesting as chocolate raisins, the Jessica in the title has absolutely no impact in the narrative, the first 20 minutes has a plot whereas the hour after that had none, the music is horrendous, the editing is choppy and confusing... And I could go on with the negatives.

It is probably the worst made movie I have ever seen but I couldn't stop laughing at what I was watching. As a comedy I would take this over some of the tosh they put out nowadays but that is all for the wrong reasons. I had fun but I could completely understand someone coming out of this movie saying this was one of the worst they've ever seen.

Don't waste your time with this movie. Dull and boring!

It's a quite surreal movie that doesn't explain itself to you, flowing along with aesthetics over story, and not really "storying" like a normal movie at all. If you're expecting a classic Hollywood-Action-Blockbuster that shows you every last detail making sure that you never need to suspend your disbelief under any circumstance, of course this is not for you. But it's imaginative and refreshing, and if you keep an open mind, you can have an interesting time with it.