handy314

The Ceaucescu-era Romanian setting is genius for this play. Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood are perfection. And the choice to make the Weird Sisters Nurse/Servants so that they linger around MacBeth in various locations to torment him is brilliantly effective: they make perfect sense silently moving about the banquet table pouring wine and serving blood red soup, or chopping up animals in the kitchen.

The post-industrial Soviet-era settings and de-natured color make the whole production give it a chaustrophobic doom. For my money, no one can manage the jump from haunted murderer better than Stewart. Macbeth is easy to bellow or chop up to make each gorgeous line more dramatic, but his simplicity and gravitas make it entirely believable he can be both the murderer and the haunted man.

This is perhaps the single best international short film ever made. It's gripping, emotionally riveting, and does the impossible: puts us in the position of a young Iranian girl in an airport in Luxembourg and forces us to empathize with her incredibly vulnerable circumstance and the few options she's afforded.

Cyrush Neshvad ratchets up the dramatic tension the way great suspense masters like Hitchcock, Kubrick and the Coens' do: by merely tossing us Direct Imagery for us to interpret. As Billy Wilder said "Make the audience add "A plus B equals C" and they'll love you.

I hate that this film exists in our world.

But I feel changed and will remember it always.

I laughed so much all the way through this film, because these Merry Dark-Robed Tricksters are the most rational and American trouble makers, correcting the skewed theocratic overreach of the white Evangelical movement in America.

It's incredibly thought provoking, and I found myself shocked that I agree with all seven of their Satanic Temple Tenets since they're really just Englightenment Era Rational Thought based on Reason and Fact, as opposed to the garble of Judeo-Christian white supremacy from the church.

I think every American should watch it. It's very even-handed and rhetorically balanced--people who spooked me in the beginning like Lucian, who I assumed is the Villain of the Piece, turns out to be a hero of American democracy by Act III, where the evangelicals are freaky.