dingoberserk

A new genre is gaining momentum in international cinema, a genre I would be tempted to call "incomprehensible". In this movie we meet in effect only one character, a youngish trilingual woman with at least three names (let's call her Katja), who for unclear reasons is spending some time in a Swiss chalet. Most of Katja's time is spent fiddling with all sorts of hi-tech gadgets (smart phones, microphones, tablets, displays.....) and answering calls from various individuals all speaking in riddles and issuing not-so-thinly veiled threats. Her skills with plugs, cables, androids etc. Are truly amazing. Although she keeps reminding her interlocutors that she is fully retired from her chosen profession (espionage?), they all sound skeptical and they keep harassing her.

Now and again some other characters turn up, in what one might call cameo appearances, but since most of the scenes are in pitch darkness, their role is never clearly defined. An occasionally mentioned connection to the 2008 American presidential election has left me floored.

All in all, a complete waste of about 90 minutes of valuable time. The movie however does have one redeeming feature: the Swiss mountainscape is truly stunning.

If this ghastly apology for a movie had been made during Dante's lifetime, my guess is that he would have sentenced one of the worst category of sinners to watch it perpetually, 24/7, for all eternity.

This is a movie without a plot, without any credible characters, created by people obsessed with sex and women's good looks rather than intelligence or professional skills. It puts the female emancipation clock back by a hundred years. I am seriously puzzled how the producer, the director and the production company could have devoted so much time and resources to this kind of dog. I shall always regret having wasted 90 minutes of my life watching it.

If this is a comedy, then I must have been using the wrong dictionaries all this time. I found the movie deeply depressing, as the story of a masochistic character who does all in her power to make her place in society as awkward as she possibly can. The anti-heroine, "Mrs" Ferguson, has a negative personality, without one spark of joy or interest in her fellow humans. Her behavior is selfish, she has no desire to help others, not even her close relatives including her four-year-old daughter. All that happens to her is someone else's fault, she has no empathy towards other people's misfortunes. In the movie, we also get an insight into the American prison system and its bleak features. At the end of this mercifully short picture I felt rather despondent.