.film inventive but perfect quite not A

Rating: 8/10 (10 December 2000)

See, I told you there were no spoilers.
I gave it an 8 rating on the strength of that.
I mustn't be too picky though. The people who made this film created a challenging and very entertaining movie, and it put my brain through its paces.
Although the acting is good across the board, and you have to think hard, which is reassuring in the face of all the audience-spoonfeeding that's out there, I can't help but feel that played forwards it's a run of the mill story that happens to have a twist if you watch it backwards. If they'd worked on it a little more so that the reverse-viewing was a complement to the film rather than the main selling point, this would have been a masterpiece.
I know it's trendy to leave questions unanswered in films these days, but there are some details that remain heavy-handedly glossed over (who the hell IS Dodd?) and others that make little sense no matter how much you replay the film forwards in your head.
However, I got the impression that the people who made this film, from the writer through to the editors, were content to rest on the laurels that their novelty-factor gave them, and worked an OK film onto the backwards presentation framework rather than a great one.
This film was indeed an interesting one, borrowing the narrative technique of reverse presentation pioneered by Pinter and giving it some good old turn-of-the-millennium grit.
There are no spoilers in this review.