Blank

A good engrossing film spoiled by incomplete end. Although it becomes repetitive, the viewer is hooked to it just to see how it ends.

And that is it - The end never happens. The story suddenly ends leaving viewers with no answers at all for dozens of questions that are relevant and obvious for any film - How can an AI operated center stop working, and no one attends to it for one month or even more? What had happened if Claire didn't finish the story - would supplies have all been consumed and she die starving? There is bound to be some human supervisor somewhere keeping tabs on how long the supplies are going to lost and he/ she should have been worried about occupied rooms and should have come enquiring. Whether the novel get published? How was it received by readers? Did she publish it under her mother's name to make amends?

Actually, I had thought that the entire Rita's "I cannot open the door till the story is finished" thing is actually the center's method to force Claire to write up the story, to bring anxiety to her, to bring depression to her, so that she is forced to overcome her writer's block. But that was not so. The film just ended.

We've seen it all before. The AI traps a woman in the house thing. We saw it in The Demon Seed and Vau and a few others as well. In this version of that story they intertwine it with a story of maternal abuse and imprisonment of the the protagonist in childhood.

It's an OK film, but that's all. The acting and production values are ok but the action feels padded out and I got rather bored about halfway through.

Maybe with a bigger budget and better directing talent it could have been something instead of the bloated short story it is.

Stop reading now. Ian padding this review out because I have to write six hundred words.

There is one idea in the movie and it is stretched out for up to an hour too long. WE get it she can't get the door open. Oh no!!! Now lets keep hammering this same idea till the audience is sick of the sight of this movie. And where is tech support or some sort of manager of these units we're staying in? Ludicrous nonsense is what it is. The author writes the story of herself as a girl trapped in a house with her mother who is blind. Oh no, she's trapped in a house again, how dramatic this must be for her. We simply must keep watching this play out in parallel. It just goes on and on and on and on...

Sometimes I wish I could detect brilliance, masterpieces and complexities and whatever superlatives they use to describe their experience (assuming its not marketing only) that easy like many reviewers do these days. Blank is not bad, the production is okay, the acting good, but the idea and the story itself is nothing really new or special. We watched this kind of movie many times before, if we are interested in that kind of movies (whatever artificial intelligence makes its own decisions and so on). If you read your good share of sci-fi stories or you watch sci-fi movies on a regular basis, this won't deliver any great surprises but the creative equivalent of a solid made cheeseburger - nothing more but nothing less.

This film should have been called Writer Blocked and be an episode of an anthology like Outer Limits or Twilight Zone. Then the fact that it only had two ideas the entire length would have made sense and the titles should have been funny. I have no problem with the actors, direction or production values. It was just stretched too much to fill a feature film (much like the lead character should have done).

I can't even mention details of the plot because I can't avoid spoiling those two basic premises of the story. Given that it is either one of those Covid-made films or another thing inspired by Moon, the entire cast is one actress and four supporting roles. It really is barebones.

Bottom line: it might be entertaining if you are doing something else at the same time. Otherwise it drags a little too long.