a Freudian friend

Rating: 8/10 (15 October 2005)

The movie is filled with psychoanalytical hints and starts with 'the image in the mirror', as Bale's character tries to unite and discover his real self and develops major Freudian themes such as the Oedipus complex and the Super-Ego guilt.
The plot has moreover highly educated hints with Dostoievski playing the leading part (The Idiot, the remorse, the prostitute, the epilepsy) and works within a powerful imagery suffocated by red and white contrasts.
I loved the invasion of the knifes, a total party of Freudian symbols, but still there were too many unclear things to leave me bothered with just one. Sometimes to stress the mystery without keeping a tight hand on the symbols is undermining and the main flaw in the script starts from letting too much space for over-interpretation.
However, the movie should lie next to Psycho in the Movie Theory Courses as a brilliant stuff for psychoanalytical themes.