MamaPapaXP

What more needs to be said? CGI created with Blender or the like, (but obvious;y with so little facilities available that almost every scene is comprised of cycling short animations, with jump-backs that really jar. (Witness an astronaut - with motionless arms - start at one end of a corridor, glide painfully slowly down the corridor - remaining motionless bar the glide - and suddenly jump back to the start of the corridor again, or DJT conversing with said astronaut and being in 4-5 separate locations whilst doing do! Ahhh!! At no point do the animators dare to tackle a human face, apart from vague impressions of DJT's clownish boat-race through his visor. He is never seen outside of his space-suit. (Although it is a spookily familiar shade of orange...) After 15 minutes of the most banal attempts at story and humour, I started skipping a couple of minutes at a time and quickly realised I was doing myself a favour, as I witnessed aliens, wheelchair bound Lucifer, werewolves, Alastair Crowley, Van Helsing, Dr. Jeckyll, Ra, Anubis and Joseph freaking Stalin! If I had forced myself to watch it all, I think I might have stabbed myself in the eye with shards of my melted laptop. One star for the attempt and one star for the song over the closing credits, 'Another Witch-hunt'. Avoid it. Seriously.

There are many artworkss I have come across I don't understand, or that grate on my eyes and ears, but I could never say 'this is the worst I've ever come across, I want my money or time back.' I just acknowledge I don't understand it and move on. The rhetoric used in many reviews here (and on other titles here) is nothing short of churlish and immature. I hope people with more rational minds can ignore the cancel culture reviews, use better judgement as to whether this film is worth their time or money and give equally fair reviews.

That being said, I've given this a 7 (a 'good' but not 'great' in my personal estimation, your mileage may vary) and recommend this highly to lovers of noir fantasy/science fiction parables, or bleak social commentary framed in a Carrollian/Kafka-esque/David Lynch set-up. Many others, like me, may probably like, enjoy or appreciate it to varying degrees, but shouldn't 'hate' it.

The two leads (Eisenberg and Poots) are quite up to the demands their predicament puts on them, and show a varied range of emotions and states. The supporting child actor, however, gives me the willies! If that wasn't his normal voice I was hearing, his mannerisms, posture and acting were still scarily on-point. (If that was his voice, however, his career should skyrocket.) As a 'family' their dynamic is both an exaggerated mirror of modern unprepared families, as well as a starkly portrayed descent into madness.

Set design and overall production quality was obviously low-budget but very effective nonetheless. It perfectly evokes the subliminal nausea that modern suburbia often instills. You are asked to pay more attention to the tasteless food, the cookie cutter clouds and the pictures on the walls to better understand the complete lack of emotion or creativity of the antagonists, how completely different a species they are.

The script is the only thing I knock a point off for. While it didn't do anything 'wrong', per se, I can agree with some reviewers that maybe, just maybe, some kind of clarification, exposition or slightly less bleak ending would make it more palatable to a much wider audience, but then we would be as remiss as if we asked Picasso to paint the whole face, or Jackson Pollock to join some of the dots up and give us a clue... Sadly, therefore, the point lost is for my own (and others) lack of vision or understanding, not the Writer/Director's ability.

Most of the English 'voices' were dubbed by Native speakers in post but, for an actor experienced in ADR/dubbing booths, lip-syncing to the Russian actors shouldn't have been too hard.

No, the trouble arises with the very words the Russians and their English colleagues were uttering; I get the distinct feeling that a great screenplay had been written but, with the decision to film a Russian movie in English, someone ran the script through Google Translate or a cheap Russian translator. (Not an English one, as they would surely have spotted 'the problem'.)

And the problem, when you get right down to it, is that NO ONE SPEAKS ENGLISH THE WAY THESE CHARACTERS DO. It is jarring. Constantly. Because words are being constantly uttered, badly, in every single scene.

That being said (sic), some of the dubbing was actually ever so slightly off and the script and film editing did need a little more care and attention, as did some of the fight choreography.

Weirdly though, I still actually enjoyed the movie. The titular character and her father have a nice interplay, the grown Abigail is pleasing to the eye and I assume is acting quite well, (given the bad script she has to read,) and most of the rest of the cast are decent enough too. (The villain and the absent minded old-man were a little off-putting but i'll put that down, again, to the script.)

The sets, costumes, sound design, lighting and camerawork are excellent and, of course, the CGI is breath-taking. (Something the Russians seem to be able to do for minimal budgets these days, take note Hollywood.)

If there any scenes removed that give a fuller back-story to the world and history outside the walls, these should be put back for the eventual DVD release but, in its present state, i'd say it is not as bad as has been made out elsewhere but does have room for improvement. 6/10