Good from all perspectives

Rating: 10/10 (18 August 2018)

You watch too many movies and have act plots memorized, know every cinematography bullet they teach in college, and got an idea for how audio should be mixed? Yeah, well, this movie breaks all of that and it is such a breath of fresh air. The cinematography is dramatic, but not distracting, it's artsy without alienating the not-artsy crowd (I usually hate artsy movies), the audio mixing is level except when it it counts the most. Without spoiling, there are times a telephone rings way louder than the rest of the movie, and there's a spot where the audio becomes gradually louder and more chatoic, but you don't notice until it suddenly drops absolutely dead quiet. This movie does such an amazing job setting mood that the theater was absolutely stunned at the end. It's damn easy to follow if you're the average movie goer, but breaks a lot of conventions that'd get a sigh from a critic. I take pride in that I know how much runtime is left in a movie based on what textbook bullet point on a three or two act structure the movie is on, but because this movie didn't restrain itself to a textbook, it flows so nicely, I had no idea when the movie was gonna end, and yet I was still stunned when it did.