Adoration

This is what cinema is supposed to be like. Flawless acting, transcending imagery, touching story, shockingly human. All-in-all, so hauntingly beautiful.

Thank you!

Merci!

Bedankt!

12-year old Paul falls in love for the first time, unfortunately with a violent, abusive and dangerously insane patient from his nurse mother's psychiatric ward. They run off together and tragic events ensue.

This came out of nowhere for me - I'd never heard of it before today and there seems very little written about it online. It's a very tightly made character piece, small in scale but beautifully shot and observed. The two teen leads are faultless and utterly believable at every turn, and we feel both great tenderness and sorrow for Paul's big, bewildered and tragically open heart doing everything he can to follow the logic of Fantine Harduin's chillingly mad (as in "Kill the chicken it is a spy for my uncle" mad) Gloria.

It's a film about trying to save someone who can't be saved, and trying to believe in someone who can't possibly be believed, and the harm to all around that inevitably follows when a well-meaning boy refuses to recognize the monster beside him who he only wants to worship. It can appear a very small story but Adoration tells it very well and much is communicated about the heavy cost of rose-tinted spectacles.

If it has a weakness, I guess maybe it ends a little anticlimacticly, but I also quite like just floating off and leaving them in this way, thinking about Hinkel's soul and the birds. It's enough.

As a doomed young Romeo and Juliet story, it's not in the same class as, say, Let The Right One In, Badlands, Bonnie & Clyde or Harold & Maude, but it put me in mind of all of them a little, and it does occasionally feel like "they don't make 'em like this anymore"

7.5

P.S., the repeating post credits scene - if it is not just a glitch on my copy - seems a puzzling waste of time.

It looks nice. But it's the same tone from beginning to end, so becomes visually boring very quickly.

The acting is just ok - incredibly earnest with lots of 'emoting' going on to fill the vast distances between plot points or intrigue.

The story is a fairly typical young love drama. Our boy is inexperienced and because of this, he devotes himself to 'rescuing' our girl who is, like, totally crazy man. She's like, totally in an institution and the bad doctors give her sedatives and stuff. And then she y'know, like, says crazy things. She's like sooo crazy.

The writing of her character is unforgiveably weak. The boy slackens his jaw and gawps at her for most of the runtime. The film plods along predictably until it stubs its toe on the ending, which is neither tragic enough nor dramatic enough to matter. In fact, the ending is where the story should have begun. Everything up until that point could have been covered in two minutes.

Tedious, thematically transparent, metaphorically barren and in love with itself. Guff.

Paul and his mother move to her new workplace, a high end psychiatric hospital. He falls for beautiful disturbed patient Gloria who convinces him to help her escape. It starts with a deadly incident and gets ever more dangerous.

For men, the crazy beauty ratio is very real and there is plenty of both in Gloria. I totally get Paul's motivation and dilemma but at some point, he has to man up. The two young leads are good. They are able to maintain intrigue in this relatively simple young tragic romance.

I haven't seen other films by this director, but I'll be sure to. I'm thoroughly pleased with this one - poetic, unintrusive, but unsparing. Subtle in its approach and daring as it deals with psychopathy in children. It evokes great performances from its main protagonists; and another actress strikingly reminded me of the one from Spoorloos (The Vanishing).

Given the film is eerie, visual and intuitive, I don't know why iMDB needs me to add many more words. I may throw in some of the heroine's: "They are snakes and pigs. They want to hurt me. So you will not abandon me? I will love you then."