The Crescent

This movie is a shining example of someone who had a very specific vision for their film, so they just did whatever they wanted and it didn't end up coming together in any meaningful way. In an attempt to be deep and symbolic the movie is instead pretentious and a waste of time. The story is nonsensical and confusing until a character just explains it at the end. It's manages to be obtuse and hard to follow without actually being intriguing or leaving much up to interpretation. It's shot like absolute garbage, mostly using a lot of ugly close ups and handheld shots that have no sense of framing for the scene. Occasionally the movie has weird interludes where the aspect ratio changes to basically portrait view for seemingly no reason. There are some interesting visuals involving paintings made by the main character, but they don't end up having any real significance other than looking cool. Every performance is laughably bad; the lead especially seems incredibly bored every time that the scene is supposed to be suspenseful or scary. Probably most damning, it just isn't scary in any way. Nothing that happens to the main character and her son is really that threatening or disturbing in any way. There are a litany of cliches and played out set ups that never go anywhere. For a movie that's paced like a slug on wet concrete it doesn't create any sense of suspense whatsoever. In total, it's stupid, it's boring, it's ugly, it's poorly acted, and it has nothing to offer on a story level. Skip it.

I recently watched The Crescent at the Vancouver Film Festival and I loved it.

The Crescent is visually stunning and tells a story that can scare someone of any age.

I don't want to give anything away but all of the little things make sense at the end and it is truly a glorious experience.

Well done!

I was hooked from the start, the single mom and her little kid, (How they made that lil' kid do so much, say so much, run around, and hide from monsters and ghosts and evil Pet Semetary cats and on and on... ) Spectacular!

It starts right with an anti-climax , in the mothers attempts at trying to rebuild her life and just be a mom to that poor child we are intermittently interlarded with dash of melancholia here and a little bits of fear here.

I was pleasently surprised, to me, it seems like there perhaps is way more to the tale, yet the narrative is so artsy , due to the fact that the mother is constantly painting in the abstract and so it the narrative touches on that as she tries to figure out what is going on, it will give you a start here and there, but at the end even after the crisis moment, we are left with a sense that something good came out of all this , do we need to understand every single second of it, I don't know, I mean the tale at some point spills into the other regions, other realms man has posed questions and inquired since time immemorial, this was just a nice artistic tale that took us there, yes though beware of really spooky creepy middle-aged men with really nice silver locks! That's one thing I learnt from this movie! lol...

Personally, I thought the actors were spot on. The child was amazing (I always cringe when a small child is in a film). I have no idea how they got the child to act. It's VERY slow, but, it did keep me interested. I would consider this more of an Art House film. I gave it a 6. Would have given this a higher rating, the slowness brought it down.

It's a slow burn for sure, it takes a while for things to start getting weird, and creepy, but once they do it gets good fast. It took a little while for me to see the twist coming, which I really liked. It doesn't come out of no where either, there's small hints. I really liked the story, and thought the slow pace at the beginning paid off in the end.

Because damn, it got REALLY creepy.

The son in the story is very young, which adds to the creepy when things set it. And I liked how they managed to keep him chatty through the story, that must have been difficult with such a young child. I really thought it was a good film if you can get past how slow it is at the beginning.