Sharp Corner

The mild-mannered "Josh" (Ben Foster), his wife "Rachel" (Cobie Smulders) and their son "Max" (William Kosovic) have a brand new home and are looking forward to settling in when there is a car accident outside and a tyre comes a-bouncing through their window at a seriously inopportune moment! Needless to say they are a bit flustered and she thinks maybe they ought to move. Well when it happens again, you'd think that'd be a bit of a no-brainer but he is somehow captivated. Not by the accidents, but by the time it takes the emergency services to arrive, and so he decides to do some training to be able to help out. Of course, his wife and young son are perplexed by his increasingly odd behaviour, as is his boss, and so there's soon a lot on the line for the man. I enjoyed the start of this, and I thought this might be Foster's best performance, but after about half an hour it became a rather joyless exhibition of obsessiveness and selfishness topped off by a truly far-fetched, though sometimes darkly comedic, desire to do good. Smulders does fine, but only features sparingly - which is just as well for given her character is supposed to be a couples therapist, "Rachel" shows a complete lack of appreciation of her husband's trauma and of their son's needs that is ultimately annoyingly breathtaking. Sadly, the initially good idea just turns into a series of overly contrived bad decisions stitched together with an implausible series of incidents that rushed through some universally unlikeable and undercooked characterisations and left me wanting more - or less. Sorry.

It's probably a bit of a stretch to even rate this at 5 stars, just as it's a stretch to label this a thriller. More a drama about a man who seems to become obsessed with life, death and playing God, it's extremely well acted by Ben Foster and Cobie Smulders but good luck finding a character to feel sympathy for when both leads are written as fairly unlikeable. While I had some sympathy for Ben's character at the beginning eventually it eroded. Cobie, as his wife, is written as being a bit too hard and harsh to feel any empathy for. So you end up sitting and watching a movie in which you just kind of dislike the people on screen. I found the ending disappointing and am not sure what the writers were trying to say. It's definitely an interesting watch but nothing to watch a second time. Ben Foster is such a great actor, it's a shame no one seems to be writing great films anymore.

It just moves along at a snails pace. I like the setting, the idea/story but it's just so slow. I like the direction the story goes but it's an agonizingly slow journey getting there. There are literally scenes of nothing for minutes at a time and you start yelling at the screen "C'mon something happen!" There are I believe three brief exciting scenes in the nearly two hour runtime. Several times throughout the movie I zoned out from boredom. A fairly original idea is what got me through to the end. I will say all the acting was top notch but as I said before it was just too slow. So was I entertained? Well, yes... for about 1\4 of the movie. Which is not nearly enough.

I first heard about Sharp Corner in one of those "upcoming trailers" things you see on YouTube and it stood out as something unique, so I kept a note to watch it. The trailer was somewhat misleading, as there's not a whole lot of action to the movie, but it is an extremely tense psychological "thriller", a word people will debate. I was actually impressed! Ben Foster has gotten very good at playing weirdos.

There are a lot of moments of just someone standing around, looking around, sitting and thinking, but it never actually felt boring to me. There was always a building tension, the feeling that something might happen at any moment, because that's what the family was feeling. I was impressed with how well they did with a very minimal movie. I have a few complaints. The major standout was the CGI, which was only for a five second scene but it just didn't hold up to modern film standards. I also felt like the couple just...never felt like a couple. I also get annoyed by kids in movies, they rarely ever feel authentic, but that's a personal gripe.

Maybe I'm being a little generous, but I'm giving the movie an 8. It's much better than I was expecting.

There were a lot of car accidents in this movie, but none were as bad as the disaster that this movie was.

Apparently it's based on a short film, and I have to wonder who thought it was a good idea to make this already boring story longer than it needed to be?

It's soooooooo slow and uninteresting for the majority of the duration.

There were scenes that were completely unnecessary. As I was trying to stay focused I thought to myself "this could have been a short" and little did I know it originally was. Why the run time of almost 2 hours is beyond me.

Not to mention that the story telling made no sense.

All that time wasted on useless scenes, and you could have addressed SO many issues that just lingered, and questions that never got answered. Waste of time. If you want something to lul you to sleep...this is it.