Shallow, Empty, Pointless

Rating: 3/10 (13 July 2019)

A shallow and empty exercise that mistakes vagueness for complexity and change for character work. The opening 10-20 minutes of the film is brutal; extremely well made and extremely true to life, but completely unnecessary and somewhat contradictory to the main points of the rest of the movie. Then we move into a slow burn look at a group of friends as they travel to Sweden to visit what they slowly discover is a murderous cult. Slow burns work best when there is mystery present, when the audience has questions they want answered. This movie doesn't have that. The characters are mostly *less* than two dimensional, other than the boyfriend who is an interesting character to watch but awful person. Every one of the main characters acts against what we know about them; this is especially rough in the climax where an important female character makes a decision that doesn't fit what we know about her at all (although the fact that all of the friends stayed after a horrific act occurs early on already destroys any sense of character that exists). There's also a character with a disability put there entirely to be "weird"; way to go, filmmakers - let's use a disability to show how weird these people are.
Shallow, empty, pointless - but apparently well-researched, so I guess that's something to think about during the 2 1/2 hour runtime