This is one weird movie. It’s almost of Rosemary’s Baby magnitude on the movie weirdness scale, but I have to say outright, not quite. It concerns a woman (Nicole Kidman) whose husband dies at the outset of the movie, who seems to return 10 years later in the body of a young boy who is so convincing that Kidman once again falls in love with him, despite being engaged to another man. As you can imagine, the story and images that unfold are pretty unsettling. It’s like Lolita in reverse on acid.

I have to say, it’s nowhere near as interesting as I’d expected from Jonathan Glazer, who is famous for his visionary commercials. And I really didn’t know much about the story, which should really have blown me away. Considering the story, in fact, I almost want to say it’s boring. But it left me with a bunch of feelings I didn’t quite understand, that I’d like to explore. That, I suppose, is great praise from me. It’s very rare these days that a movie can leave me without a reference to compare what I’m feeling to. It’s yet another movie this week that I need to see again. Nicole Kidman deserves an Oscar nomination (but not an Oscar) for her performance, as do the screenwriters.

For those who are not sure what to expect from the movie, without spoiling it: this is to all intents and purposes, a horror movie of Kubrickian or Shyamalanian standards – it has the artful and unsettling images and the big twist, etc – but imagine all that being swabbed by a very Ang Lee – ish sponge of repression. There’s no jumpy scenes, no gory scenes of violence. It’s just scary, depending on your outlook.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 11th, 2004 at 12:54 am in Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.