Manodrome

Manodrome is a wild ride where we follow the subtlies of a quiet "average" man who meets the wrong people at the right time causing a pressure cooker situation. People saying the film was null of meaning may need some self reflection, the movie clearly nods at what is to come early on and the leads erratic behaviour shows how the pressure guides his choices. The film is the sad, violent and lonely story of a man who because of his upbringing was never able to express himself and now he's invited to open up and influenced into taking matters into his own hands, but his emotions have boiled over in ways he cannot understand nor control before it's too late.

It has the feel of Fight Club but by far has lost itself in a film that you wait for a punch but it never comes. There was no surprise at the ending, the acting could be a ten but the storyline spares none of the performances , I'm a huge fan of both Jesse Eisenberg and Adrian Brody that brought about the most disappointing of all. I even wish I could say the film had any kind of potential but no go. Brody's performance as god was a stick man with a soft guy with nothing else overcomes the soft guy personality. If you watch this prepare yourself for a let down and maybe spare yourself the disappointment and watch something more promising!

In dark dramatic thriller "Manodrome" troubled East-Coast blue-collar gym-rat Jesse Eisenberg (excllent - and ripped, as never seen before) struggles to cope mentally & financially with losing his job while girlfriend Odessa Young is nine months pregnant - and his psychological state sure ain't calmed by falling in with Adrien Brody's mysoginistic cult (with the likes of Ethan Suplee) that sparks him into rapidly spiralling volatility & violence. In his first US film, South African writer/director John Trengove packs a raw punch, with originality (while drawing inspiration from great movies like "Taxi Driver" & "Fight Club"). It'll not be for all, but is well worth seeing.

Is this part of the new wave of filmmaking that features protagonists who don't know what they want, and have no goal? Do things happen in this movie? Sure, lot's of things that make no sense whatsoever because the protagonist is a malformed character who basically functions as a broken robot for whoever wrote this. Is he human? Sure. Does he act like any human being ever has? Probably not. Do we care enough about him to want him to succeed? Succeed at what? All he does is meander around making one terrible decision after another as if he had no backbone or even the intelligence of a parrot.

I'll never understand how stuff like this gets greenlit.

Jesse Eisenberg at his most physical preformens. Adrien Brody is really an actor of a generation, and for me Odessa Young is a Revelation. But alongside some powerful scenes and well crafted disturbing imagery, it seems that the creator of the film hasn't quite decided where to take the story. And here it falls short of similar masterpieces like Gone Girl or Power of the Dog.

I saw the film at the Haifa Film festival. It was interesting to see the reaction of the audience, including one husband who, ironically, how couldn't stand the film any longer and informed his wife that he would meet her outside. You'll see which scene it happened in.