Disappointment has a new name.

Rating: 2/10 (9 June 2018)

When I was a kid, my parents often discussed a movie that they had seen when they first started dating: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. People had been talking about how amazing the film was and when they went, they sat there confused and upset in the theater. For years, any time they rated a movie as boring, too strange or overly hyped, they would reference Argento's film. I always wondered if it upsets them that I grew up loving horror and giallo films so much.
One day, I explained what I thought that movie was about to my parents. There's gender reversal, as well as being a foreigner and the isolation of modern life, filtered through the lens of an auteur. Maybe it didn't all make sense to him, but I think my explanation made them get a little more of why I liked it so much.
My wife and I are planning on having kids some day. If one of them ever sits me down and explains why this movie is good to me, I'm going to disown them.
If you thought movies like The Witch moved slowly, the glacial pace of this film makes that film seem like a slam-bang Honk Kong action pic. It takes forever to decide on what the movie is even about, smashing our expectations and killing off a major character - again, let me reinforce that spoiler warning - when Charlie goes to a party, has an allergic reaction and is beheaded while her brother races to get her to the hospital.
That was the one true surprise of the film, one that made me think that it was getting ready to gear up and deliver on its promise to be the scariest movie of our generation.
Look - I'm not going to deny the talent of the people involved in the film. Toni Collette is an amazing actress and she imbues the mother of this film with true emotion. It's as if her parts of this film seem to be a drama about dealing with loss and never truly understanding our parents and the gnarled roots of our family tree.
While I was watching this film, a man snored loudly to my left and I wondered what magical dreams that he was having and how I could experience them instead of what was on the screen. I was jealous of the fact that his girlfriend allowed him the pleasures of dreamland while my wife continually poked me in the ribs to keep me awake during the slow opening of this film that then ground its gears to move even slower.
Let's be perfectly frank. I hated this movie. It doesn't matter to me how many people love it or proclaim it as high art or say that it's the scariest movie they've seen and how much it haunts them. That's great - I'm happy that they had such a reaction to it. My reaction differs and I'm willing to sit down and ponder for nearly three times the length of this film exactly what I have to say about it. And that, I guess, is something of a success for this movie. Films should make you think and consider and examine. And this movie certainly did that. It also made me wonder exactly what I'd chose to watch when I got home to exorcise its stink from consciousness.
This movie is style over substance, an effort that tries to tell a story that has no character to root for or care about. We have no idea what they are battling against so we have no way to figure out how they can avoid the outcome. I feel like I wasted money on this film, which is rough yet I can get it back, but I also wasted so much time caring about it and watching it, which is something that I can never get back. It needs an editor that could have trimmed its various narratives into a better collective whole. It's like steak on steak on steak, covered with 19 kinds of steak sauce, all eaten slowly through a straw after someone else has methodically chewed it for you. And after all that, it tastes like offal.