A Sugary Confection

Rating: 5/10 (14 January 2015)

It's a film that defies analysis, because frankly, there's no real meaning behind it. It's a bit of a sugary confection, with a very thin story and wholly unbelievable scenes, sets and characters. It's not quite interesting enough for fantasy, but it is probably well classified within that genre; absurdist fantasy. It departs from other absurdist films by this director in being quite untethered to any plausible reality, making it not quite nearly as compelling as some of his other, in my view, better films. Ralph Fiennes as a disappearing species in a disappearing milieu would be interesting if the film weren't so completely farcical. And so you have a kind of cartoonish mystery balancing on completely impossible and implausible scenarios carried out by mostly nonsensical characters, giving this film all the depth of a comic book. It's simply impossible to give a crap about any of it. The pastel-rich pastiche only adds to the sensation of being afloat in a sea of cake frosting. Not a great success, in my view, and hardly interesting enough, frankly, to have kept my attention from wandering.