tamathews01

Horror is an excellent way of exploring things like mental health (Saint Maud), Grief (the babbadook) and in this case post-partum depression. It is something people don't talk about much, and was a great candidate for a film.

Unfortunately it didn't work. At all. The lead actress tried but the script was incredibly clunky and contained some of the worst dialog I have listened too in a long time. It was very stilted, very un-natural, and required the actors to over-act to compensate. Filled with cliches, and the entire thing felt mechanical, like the writer had tried to study humans from a distance through bad TV but had never actually had a relationship with one. You could basically see the calculations he/she had made about each line. The exposition was sloppy, and we constantly learn about the inner mental state of the character because she verbally tells us (through the gimmick of writing in a journal), which is a cop out to give information we should have been able to glean from the acting and visuals (but couldn't because there wasn't space for that).

I don't understand on any level why the writer decided to make the husband a paediatrician, it serves to make every subsequent decision make zero sense at all. He is a qualified medical doctor who knows that his wife has a serious pre-existing mental health condition, is off her medication, the danger that poses, and also knows full well the additional mental health risk from postpartum depression. A conference of other paediatricians is basically the most forgiving event you can imagine in terms of understanding why he would need to bow out. He was also stupid to commit to it, even if the baby arrived slightly earlier than expected. His reaction to her phone call admitting problems was just ridiculous

She then receives medical advice from her doctor, in a conversation where she admits having serious trouble and absolutely 100% shows diagnosable signs of postpartum depression, and despite knowing that she is alone and has a history of mental health problems he does nothing. This again makes even less sense when you think about the fact that the husband is a doctor, it is highly unlikely that he doesn't know her doctor at least professionally because he would have recommended him). On top of that again the dialogue just isn't like any medical conversation anyone has ever had with their doctor, the tone was wrong, the logic of the conversation was wrong, everything about it was wrong.

Even the baby was terrible, there are scenes where the baby is crying and coughing after feeding and you can see very very clearly that it is completely inanimate plastic baby, not even being moved by the actor. They choose silly camera angles to try and disguise it (but then cut to angles that make it obvious thus defeating the point).

The score was also amateurish, the logic seemed to be "something significant has happened, so let's accent it with a loud noise!". The highly discordant noises came in far too early and there is no particular build up in intensity, which there absolutely needed to be.

It was a terrible shame to lump the actors with this film. The script should never ever have been selected for production.

Lots of the other reviews here are from people saying it is too slow, or not "horror" enough. Personally I enjoy both jump scare and gory horror as well as interesting psychological horror, the pacing did not bother me at all. It just isn't a good psychological horror, or drama ,or anything else. Do not allow whomever wrote this script to waste your evening.

There are some films that one enjoys so much that it is difficult to rate how good they actually are. One of the other reviews described it as a 'warm hug' and that's exactly what it was, and I don't know if I feel it has more depth to it because I enjoyed it rather than because that depth is actually there.

I found Dakota Johnson completely mesmerising, and came away wanting to watch more of her work. You get the sense from her character of someone who has struggled, with enough intellect to have grown from it, and developed strong sense of who they are. This is then contrasted strongly with Cooper Raiff's character, who is equally likeable and equally emotional empathetic in many ways, but has clearly not developed a sense of who he is yet, and is not really her equal, despite them having similar underlying temperaments that are highly compatible.

Some films focus on showing you how someone's internal life is very different from their external life, or at least how you would perceive them externally, and I think this film does that with relationships. The way it initially presents the relationship between Johnson's character and her fiancé, and between Raiff's character's mother and stepfather, and between Raiff's character and Johnson's character is completely different to how you see all those relationships by the end. In each case it shows you relationships that work for reasons that are deeper and more complex than just infatuation, and under the surface work incredibly well, despite your initial impression that they may be a bit stolid, and the consequence of the people involved 'settling'. I think it took great skill to make a satisfying ending by denying the satisfying ending you initially think you want, and by taking a very kind compassionate view of almost all its characters (the exceptions perhaps being the characters that appeared in the end credits as Mr Prick, Mrs Prick, and little Prick)

It was flawed, the actual cinematography was at times noticably not great, some of the dialogue was a bit weak (although some of it was also fantastic), and Cooper Raiff is not a great actor, but for me all of those things were outweighed by the positives, the script and the acting power of Dakota Johnson is more than enough to carry the film.

There is a bias I think where people tend to regard films that show healthy relationships and positive themes as being fundamentally less serious and important than those covering dark topics and difficult struggles, which I think has worked against this film in terms of its reception. It is more than just a feel-good film I think, and considerably better than other films you might put in that category like CODA, which was incredibly bland by comparison.

The real central problem with the film, beyond the quibbles above, is that Cooper Raiffs character is too idealised, especially for someone that young. His only character flaw is naivety, and the lowest point for his character only involves being mildly disinterested in helping someone else. Throughout the rest of the film he deals with bad circumstances incredibly well, and is positive to everyone around him all the time. That said, it was written, directed and acted by someone in their 20s and given the emotional maturity of the script in its general aim I think it was outstanding, and Cooper Raiff has fantastic potential as a writer and director for the rest of his career.

Good films with political statements to make tend to work only if they ground their points in something emotionally compelling. It tries to do this and provide an interesting psychological thriller about trusting strangers to stay in the same house, as well as political commentary.

The first part almost works I think, it felt compelling to start with, and although I didn't buy all of the characters decisions it was good enough, and the tension interesting enough to keep going with. Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke and Julia Roberts are all reliable. If they'd ditched most of the surrounding mystery and never solved it, and focussed just on the dynamics inside the house, and written the interactions a bit better, it could have been a good film.

The problem is that they sprinkle all these clues in for the mystery, and the final reveal just completely flat-out ignores most of them which don't make any sense, and is based on a very very half-baked understanding of current affairs. The plot stitches together a collection of topical keywords and wastes them.

The central idea is that a foreign country would plot to destabilise a rival by using a coup-de-tat, because it is cheap. This is certainly an option and something that larger countries have a history of doing in smaller countries to achieve geopolitical aims.

This 'cheap' intervention turns out to involve developing highly sophisticated sonic explosives that "transmit microwaves through sound" (this was the point where the film tipped over into being actively insulting and aggravating). These explosives cause one person out of 5 to have negative health effects. They have also developed satellite weapons capable of wiping out all global communications systems, and large drones that have been smuggled into America and can operate dropping leaflets without those communications systems. On top of this by the end there are bombs and small-arms fire indicating that someone has managed to organise ground forces for an entire rebellion inside of 2 days, and also hack into everything from power stations to the private networks of companies like Tesla remotely with no-one noticing to perform actions that are highly complex and would in reality cost trillions to orchestrate.

It was very, very American. There is this persistent idea under the surface of American culture that everything will come crashing down and that people can grab a shotgun and live in an every-man-for-himself world. Something certain men are clearly very drawn to fantasising about, but is not realistic.

And also switching off GPS won't cause the manned oil tankers to suddenly beeline for the coast at a 90 degree angle to try and beach themselves. Some tankers getting damage because they end up in areas they shouldn't be? Sure. Random beachings like that? No. Likewise planes would not suddenly all nosedive to crash in certain locations.

The idea that an outside country would stoke divisions to paralyse a country is worth discussing, the threat from cyber-warfare is worth discussing, the fragility of some of the communication systems that underpin modern life is worth discussing, but this film doesn't manage to say anything meaningful about any of these things.