Lithivm

I recently had the opportunity to see Lithium at a local film festival. This film was not only the best film I saw at the festival, but one of the best films that I've seen in a long time.

The story takes place in Stockholm, Sweeden and revolves around a young girl who is working as an assistant journalist for a small paper. The girl soon becomes obsessed with a local story about a series of unsolved murders that have taken place, and becomes determined to find the killer on her own.

The director's unique, "hand held" style of filming combined with a very effective use of music and sound and a great story, make this a fascinating film.

If you like a good thriller that will keep you glued to the edge of your seat until the very end, this is a must see film!

Murders are being commited in Stockholm, and there is obviously a serial-killer around. Some quite stupid girl working as a journalist assistant starts to look into the case, determined to find the murderer.

The characters are realistic, and the filming is like in "NYPD Blue", with (intended) poor picture quality. A serial-killer case is not exactly an original plot, but it works out OK much due to the movie's creepy atmosphere.

If you like murder investigation movies, check it out.

Some of the users who have posted comments about Lithivm seem to have missed the point entirely. The film breathes fresh air into the serial killer genre and the end result redraws the map of a serial killer's mind trying to understand it rather than getting lost in pornographic, senseless violence like most recent filims of this kind. Lithivm uses the childish naivete of its main character to reflect on our obsession with serial murders, violence and success. Plot aside, the film looks incredible: super-saturated, grainy shots and handheld like you've never seen before. Seven has nothing on this film when it comes to the cinematography. Any film which causes this much anger among imdb users has got to be worth checking out. So watch it and make up your own mind.

The young director of this film is obviously aiming for a gritty, "Dogme-95" look and feel - something that worked well for another contemporary Swedish film, "F**king Amal" ("Show Me Love" in the U.S.). However, here it is merely a shallow exercise in stylistics, supporting a moronic story about a young journalist who pursues a man she believes is a serial killer. Of course he is, but that doesn't stop the journalist from doing some insanely stupid things - she even goes to the man's house and wraps his tie around her neck, asking him to strangle her! Moreover, several scenes where we apparently go "inside the head" of the killer just come across as silly.

Despite a few random moments of inspiration, the film as a whole is a pretentious, overlong mess, thoroughly ugly in every respect. Somebody in Sweden was shocked that this was included in the Hollywood Film Festival. Don't be shocked - that festival included several of the worst films I saw in 1999. There were perhaps 20 people in the audience when I sat down to watch "Lithivm;" by the time the film was over, perhaps 5 were left. No doubt masochists like myself.

And if someone says something else, they must be lying.

I suppose the director at some point had a vision of a good movie, but the result is quite far from that. Never before have I seen a movie or even a home made amateur film that have done EVERYTHING so completely wrong.

If you are not Swedish you can't possibly understand how extremely stupid and unnatural the dialogue sounds. But anyone should be able to see that the story and characters are just too weird.

I actually saw the whole movie, just to see if there would be interesting twist or surprise that would make anything in this movie make sense, but there wasn't.