Half of a great movie

Rating: 5/10 (30 October 2019)

Overrated doesn't even begin to describe this film. I'm a fan of the director and am always excited when a new film of his is announced, and so it was with this film. Sadly, it does not deliver like his other works do. Performances are all uniformly excellent - particularly that of the poor family's father and the house maid of the rich family. Inventive camera work, a few chuckles here and there and a halfway point twist that makes you extremely uncomfortable and excited for where the story will go next and then...the story just takes a nose dive off of a cliff never to recover. As the film crawled towards its conclusion I couldn't wait to get out of the theater. By the time it's hoping to be ending arrives, I had already checked out. An interesting failure with a lot on its mind, but in the end, what's really underneath it all is a muddled point about class that isn't truly made. I would like for the film to have gone farther and darker than it did or to not have gone dark at all in the first place. This is a film that tries to be too many things at once and leaves you feeling cheated of seeing the movie you thought you were going to get. I keep thinking back to the one review blurb from the trailer (paraphrasing) "a film that starts out as one thing and then becomes something entirely different" - yeah, becomes a big stinker.