Horsehead

This movie is indeed well done! The acting was good, the scenes and locations were perfect! The symbolism. And just the general quality of the movie was outstanding! I just had difficulty knowing what was going on much of the time. Also, there wasn't good flow for me. I had to watch it separate days to finish. Horsehead was a beautiful piece of cinematic art that wasn't that entertaining as a movie.

By certain aspects, "Horsehead" made for me thought of the Dario Argento's Inferno : both movies have in common to be enigmatic, fascinating, of a total pictorial beauty, but also to rather hermetic and difficult to access.

Horsehead risks hardly to embarrass and to divide the spectators. The movie is not indeed an entertainment popcorn and will ask a real effort of attention and especially an emotional participation and a total dumping in its universe.

Horsehead indeed takes the shape of a nightmare in the shape of mysterious puzzle, plunging her heroine into a terrible, dreamlike, fantastical, gory and erotic universe.

Following the example of "Lords of Salem" (Rob Zombie - 2012), Horsehead is for my part one of the most interesting proposals of the fantastic movies seen for a long time.

(sorry for my English...)

This is a bizarre movie that does a very good job depicting the nature of the nightmare, not the bad dream itself, rather the malicious entity that causes sleep paralysis and bedevils the victim with awful dreams. If you are unfamiliar with the folklore I suggest you look it up as that knowledge may congeal the seemingly disjointed story in your mind.

The imagery was beautiful while the story was rather simplistic, although I feel if the story was more complicated it may have distracted from the nature of the nightmare (horsehead) itself. There is so much communicated through the nightmare images that no narrative is needed to explain the journey if you are acquainted with the folklore.

Visually this film is at times quite stunning, but beyond that there's not much else to recommend it.

Unfortunately one reviewer had to compare it to Dario Argento's work, which then started a trend. In reality it is only the director of photography that resembled Argento in this film, the actual director had some nice ideas but fails to hold the film together. The comparison with such a brilliant director is nothing short of total nonsense.

The cinematography was the best part of this movie, providing a powerfully attractive opening scene which exquisitely recreates Fuseli's 18th century oil painting, The Nightmare. After this point however the film is gradually let down by weak acting, a poor script and an overall immature plot.

That's unfortunate because it seems this film had potential, taking iconography from sleep paralysis, some interesting ideas provided by Jungian psychology and consistently attractive scene construction. But all of this gets flushed down the pan by a director who seems determined to compromise everything this film could have been with an over reliance on visual effects and music apparently compensating for a lack of any real substance.

This film is the work of a great cinematographer and a director that needs to develop his ability, especially his screen writing.

Surreal, phantasmagoric, enigmatic! HORSEHEAD is a visually stunning puzzle full of symbolic figures where each one of them represent one particular icon related to imagery of dreams. We can notice, for instance, the clear inspiration in some previous and notable works about the allegories of dreams, as the Henry Fuseli's painting THE NIGHTMARE. And this inspiration is not denied, it's even reinforced when at the beginning of the movie appears a picture of that famous painting... On the other hand it made me remind some surrealistic and artsy films of the 70's, in particular those from European cinema (also French cinema...). The kind of cinematography used, the short but puzzling plot, the enigmatic symbols and characters, the twisted eroticism, the camera work - focusing on certain plans and details... All of this truly make me compare this film to those remarkable movies of the 70's. But of course HORSEHEAD has it own value, in fact it's a great film that we could resume as a frantic journey into the depths of the subconscious, a dream that crosses two dimensions, ending both in one same reality...