Like Cattle Towards Glow

I fought my way through this film without passing out. It is well made and the film has a strong visual sense, and the acting is variable and sometimes very good especially in the first episode. I found Hau's performance brave and it was a demanding role to play. Only his strong accent when speaking in English prevented me from fully understanding the dialogue. Now for the content which concentrates on torture and more disturbingly the mental torture of the young. The film is full of death and that does not surprise me as I know ( in my opinion ) that Dennis Cooper's work is full of violence especially his novel ' Frisk ' which there again made me disturbed and feel faint. So for the faint hearted like me this is not the film for you. The penultimate episode of the film is in my opinion unwatchable and the death scene here in an abstract landscape shows pleasure in the extinction of life which I as a viewer I cannot and do not want to believe in, and given the number of deaths and suicides of young men homeless on the streets of many countries I find these representations of the need to end life distasteful. It is a vision of death as despairing pleasure.

This is the most bizarre, most depressing, slow-moving, boring, and the dumbest thing I've ever seen. I actually got so bored at 58 minutes, I bailed. Be forewarned. I don't see how this thing ever got made. It's about death. Death, and some lame excuses for sex that really never happens. The most unexciting and depressing thing I've ever seen. Did I mention it's about death? Teenagers thinking about dying, teenage boys looking and acting totally depressed thinking about death in separate chapters that are totally unrelated. I really hated what I managed to sit through, but I had to pull the plug. I felt like I was dead. Dying for it to end, but it didn't. I made it dead.

One word: ridiculous. What a waste of time. Those writers have to be really messed up in the head to come with some stories like those in this "film".

Really disturbing to think someone thought they were good enough to be part of a film. Just avoid at all cost.

I was intrigued by the poetic title, but its possible meaning proved to be as unfathomable as the movie itself. As far as I could discern, this collection of five short movies seems to be about young people who, in various states of existential crisis, juggle with the concept of sex and death. Such a topic could make an interesting film, but here the chosen form was way too enigmatic and too excruciatingly slow to even remotely make you care for the presented stories and characters, let alone for the possible messages it all might have contained. So whatever the intentions of the maker(s) may have been, it totally eluded my mental grasp!

Another major distraction was the dominance of graphic sex. I'm not a prude, but I think sex in movies (be it mainstream or arthouse) should at least be functional to the story. Here it was all over the place, and too often unnecessarily in your face (like the very first opening scene) or cringing and even unsavory to watch (the one with the two guys making out against a tree). It impressed me as deliberately wanting to be as provocative as possible.

Visually it was all well done, and some of the actors looked at least interesting (like Nicolas Hau). But the almost declamatory way in which they were all made to deliver their (intended) philosophical and profound, but in fact totally incomprehensible lines got more and more annoying. Together with the long pauses, the lingering close-ups and the long empty glances, it all sadly came down to an irritating, uninvolving and over-pretentious bore.