Chariot

Apart from just a couple of interesting scenes or moments, the entire film is a very pale attempt at surrealist cinema.

Surrealist or avant-garde films are a cool genre. But the problem with many of them is that they just think up weird nonsensical things to put in for the sake of being weird and cool. But the best surrealist films or directors always have a core sensibility to them, a story, a moral, a deep meaning, a connectedness, and either a beauty or terror to it -- eg, "8 1/2" or "Mulholland Drive".

This film tho is just a try-hard sophomoric effort. And the audience sees right thru it, as all the reviewers here have demonstrated. They're not fooled by it's absence of purpose and meaning.

I should have listened to the reviews. The movie started out rather interesting. Disconnected events and a floating man in the apartment building lobby made me wait for a connection. The explanation of the floating man never came and the final story line was really rather simplistic and boring.

Well that was dull. Someone really fed the bull a lot of laxatives to get this script out. I assume the recognizable actors were either lied to or under some form of contract, because this movie can only harm their careers.

Just, don't watch this. You are better off having a nap.

Btw, each traveller pays nine coins. Total twenty-seven coins. Bellhop keeps two of the coins. Total twenty-five coins to pay for the room, not twenty-nine as Johnny M stated. Manager originally received thirty coins, then returned five coins. Total twenty five coins for the room. 25=25. WTF are you talking about a missing coin?

A man retains a memory of an old life and cannot let it go. A doctor tries to figure out why the memory is persistent. The man continues his existence, unaware of his changed condition and trying to understand his new surroundings.

The story is told with dream logic. It paints mundane concepts on top of an unknowable in-between existence, and drops hints about the characters without telling too much. Is the man's bare room a reflection of who he was before? Is the woman's nicely decorated apartment a reflection of her previous existence?

The doctor's resolution to the man's problem is to burn the memories. He severs the man's ties to his old life, but the cycle continues anew in a different form.

This is one of the better movies I have seen this year and I look forward to more from the writer and director. The cast is also top-notch. The marketing team dropped the ball.

I consider myself as reasonably intelligent, but this movie went totally beyond me! Thanks to the titles of the various parts (chapters) I at least could gather that reincarnation should be the main theme, so somehow all the goings on had to be related to that. But to be honest, I nowhere in this movie came across even one single thing that seemed in any way to refer to reincarnation. When I force myself to look at it with a positive, or at least a well-meaning attitude, I could say that it's about dreams: either the psychological meaning of (recurrent) dreams, like forming a bridge to repressed memories from childhood; or even, in a more surrealistic way, comparing life itself to a dream. But reincarnation???

There are definitely interesting scenes, also visually, like the party where all these weird guests were gathered, or the masked woman singing on the rooftop, or the almost gothic scene of the surgical operation that took place in a deserted medieval tower. But unfortunately there were many more totally unfathomable scenes and actions that seemed to go nowhere, like the floating man, or the doubling of the persona of Rory (who or what Rory was stayed unclear anyway), or the "Help...!"-cries that came out of several different phones. Were these things maybe meant to be supernatural? Or was the whole movie one big dream??

It all went (I'm sorry to say) down the same dreary and pretentious drain. The pace is extremely slow, the dialogues are awkward, and the acting is unimpressive, except for Thomas Mann, but he couldn't save this project on his own. John Malkovich sure didn't help, with his (as so often) blatant over-acting.