I'll say this for the boring, tedious and completely flat and uninteresting mini-feature (clocking in at barely an hour) The Hatred: it has some nice photography and even a couple of interesting camera compositions. Does that make it worth sitting through? Absolutely not! You have the simplest of revenge plots, a nice little twist when a dead man is resurrected to assist, all the potential in the world and yet it is rendered dull and uninteresting by the writer's complete inability to flesh out the story in any way. Couple that with direction so desperate to be "ARTISTIC!!!!" that it manages to make stalking, killing and haunting, boring, boring and boring and your failure is assured. Everything other than the photography and a few camera angles seems deliberately done to frustrate the viewer and sabotage the film. There's nothing like showing us a bunch of men standing around and then having the voice over of a young girl - who was not there - tell us what they're thinking. Hey, isn't that what dialogue is for? Or how about never showing the incidents we might get involved in so that you can waste our time showing people just walking in the snow?
And I cannot stress this enough - there is a special place in Hades reserved for the near-ceaseless narration as it drones on with all the depth and literary quality of a computer program randomly slamming words into a sentence. It actually makes pretentious, gibberish sound good in comparison. I wish I was joking but I'm not. What she says LITERALLY makes no sense and/or contradicts itself. It is the worst sort of nonsense pretending to be profound. And the young actress speaking the nonsense may make an interesting visual - staring off into space with her dark oversized hat - but the rest of her performance, and certainly her insipid line-readings, are equally still and emotionless. Her hat has a lot more charisma and screen presence and could probably handle the narration better also. For that matter, the hat could have written a better screenplay.
Add in the pointless ending (that makes no sense) and I am tempted to believe that this project is simply a bad-joke version of a bad movie; I find it hard to believe that anybody could have spent this much effort on such a ridiculous script unless it was their intention to make something awful. I mean, they had to know...right? They had to.
