Monstres ordinaires

Paul is driving his 14 year old daughter Sarah. They pick up her best friend Charlie. The girls go off into the woods for a bathroom break. After awhile, Paul looks for the girls to find Sarah standing on the edge of a dam. She tells him that she pushed Charlie to her death. Sarah seems shocked and unaware. She is still angry at her divorced father's absence and his new girlfriend Jessica. Paul tells his ex-wife Christine and they struggle to handle the revelation. Charlie's volatile recovering alcoholic father comes looking for his missing daughter.

This is a nice indie noir. It's a nice morality ride down. It starts off with an interesting psychopath daughter which turns into a fine teenage rebellion. It would be great to have more intense thrills and I don't understand what they're doing with the backpack. It seems obvious to dump the backpack at the dam especially since they go back there anyways. Did she think that it would dissolve? The filmmaking needs more style to increase the intensity. Otherwise, this is a great little noir.

Saw this at the Leiden (NL) film festival 2015. Interesting to see how a blatant lie came about, gave rise to more lies, and how it all escalated into something that nobody really wanted yet proved inevitable. The premise that Sarah pushed her friend Charlie from the bridge, may seem unrealistic, but it came forth from reasons deemed logical by Sarah from her viewpoint. It could have been a stolen boyfriend, or spreading lies about her, or some other reason important enough for her to make this push an easy solution. When Sarah's parents hear about the accident, they go at any imaginable length to hide the awful truth and to protect their daughter against the outer world. Later on we learn that what really happened is all very different from what we got presented from the outset. That being precisely the core business of a thriller, it is very commendable that we did not outguess it until very late. In other words, the story was well built and kept us in tension all the time, eagerly awaiting the next turn of events to surprise us.

This wasn't a bad movie but the first part of it moved really slow. I was also able to see what was coming and I would've liked to have been surprised by the twists that lay ahead. The actors played their parts well and the atmosphere was really tense throughout the movie. While a lot of focus went towards the tension between the immediate family members, the location of the filming helped. The reservoir looked like and represented just how big their problem was. I also loved how the caterpillar was used to represent the unfolding of lies. One other thing that really bugged me was the scene at the police station. How long did Dad stand outside holding that backpack? No one saw that? That was just a weird moment for me. Overall this is a decent film and not a bad watch.

A solid crime drama, part thriller which is spine chilling keeping you adherent to the chair totally not relaxed, we feel that as if we are the part of the disturbed family. I think it sort of goes from being a slow burner to an interesting examination of a very dysfunctional family that garble their otherwise normal lives. A simple story of a father who struggles with his conscience when he tries to protect his daughter for killing her best friend. The plot that follows, acquires serpentine proportions, and begins to crawl beneath your skin, dragging you more and more into the setting much like a shepherd would haul his sheep. This near perfect script has been dealt with utmost care to seal off all loopholes the human mind could ever conjure up which cleverly balanced between plot and psychology, contrary to the nonchalant treatments that grace thrillers these days. I strongly recommend this film, especially to the thriller genre lovers.

What would you do or rather what would you not do to protect your kid if faced with the situation that she or he has done something very wrong? When do mistakes that everybody makes at the teen ages turn into something very different and very abhorrent? Is the line of demarcation between sanity and insanity, between being a normative person and a monster that clear? These are some of the questions one keeps asking while watching 'We Monsters' ('Wir Monsters' in German) directed and co-written by Sebastian Ko. I knew nothing about this film maker, according to IMDB this is only his second full feature film, and it's quite good.

It's a thriller, and a good one, so I will avoid telling too much about the story. Two separated parents come together to help their daughter in a critical moment of her life. There are enough surprises and changes of perspective to keep the interest of viewers alert from start to end. There is also a quite serious collection of subterranean themes like responsibility, borders of parental love, teenage revolt and communication between generations. All these come together in a more than satisfactory manner.

The film is supported by solid acting by the whole team of actors, but especially by Mehdi Nebbou in the role of the father and Janina Fautz as the teenage daughter. A slightly higher dose of cinematographic effects would have turned this film into a horror movie, but film director Sebastian Ko seems to have chosen to stay within the limits of a realistic psychological thriller. I found it good as it is. The horror version can be left for the American remake.