Orsetto25

The Beta Test is not just a critique of Hollywood; it's a scalpel to the tissue of modern identity. Wrapped in the glossy skin of a thriller, it peels back the layers of performance anxiety, systemic hypocrisy, and moral implosion with a fevered, almost operatic intensity.

The protagonist - jittery, dishonest, and painfully performative - is a mirror of every person trapped in the tyranny of charm. His need to appear "likeable" at all costs echoes our collective addiction to optics over truth. A key moment, set along a wooded trail, reveals his core: "I act nice because I'm terrified of being judged." It's a confession - but not a transformation. He is too deep in the role to walk off stage.

The anonymous letter scheme, the sexual encounters, the killings - they are plot devices, yes, but also allegories. This is a world where truth is sabotage and where entire systems - professional, romantic, digital - are built to preserve the mask, not the face beneath it. The "beta test" isn't just the software metaphor: it's the existential diagnosis. You are not even your final version.

The soundtrack is a masterstroke. Vivaldi's Winter and the haunting Dies Irae root the story in a cultural memory of Venetian masquerades, where masked depravity was elegant, and elegance, depraved. Like 17th-century Venice, modern Hollywood (and by extension, the world it shapes) is a carnival of beautiful lies.

If you're looking for a clean narrative arc or satisfying resolution, look elsewhere. The Beta Test is messy, anxious, and deeply uncomfortable - and that's its triumph. It doesn't want to please you. It wants to corner you.

I watched The Shrouds expecting at least a daring exploration of grief or human vulnerability. What I found instead was a sluggish, self-indulgent, and ultimately hollow exercise in pseudo-intellectual horror. Cronenberg - once capable of disturbing with purpose - now seems trapped in an aesthetic of sterile morbidity and narrative convolution.

The film meanders through incoherent subplots that intertwine and dissolve into nothingness. Each thread promises depth, only to end in a fog of cheap symbolisms and gratuitous body horror, as if decomposition itself was enough to sustain philosophical weight. It's not.

The protagonist embodies the film's central flaw: a bland, overcontrolled narcissist, desperately trying to appear tormented and profound while radiating the erotic tension of a sedated therapist. The erotic elements, in fact, are reduced to hollow gestures that feel more like geriatric fantasies than true explorations of desire.

Even the performances - usually a lifeline in Cronenberg's works - seem dragged down by the script's redundancy and lack of emotional traction.

In the end, The Shrouds is not provocative, nor brave, nor disturbing. It's simply gratuitous. And above all: deeply boring.