I kinda knew I’d love this. For me it’s somewhere between Angela’s Ashes and Hideous Kinky. As with the latter, there is the gift of two incredible young performances (Sarah and Emma Bolger), some nightmarish sequences, a general playing with reality (at several stages characters look at the camera, at one point even addressing it, “This is make-believe,”) and a mysterious dark stranger in the form of the beautiful (in ways far beyond the physical) neighbour, played by Djimon Hounsou.

I really wish I’d watched this when I’d been back into writing reviews for a while ‘cos I feel like I should be writing so much more about it. But all I can say is wow, it’s beautiful. This is the kind of movie I think François Truffaut meant when he said, “I’m not interested in the films that don’t vibrate,” – from the very start, this one envelopes you. It’s simultaneously viscerally realistic and fantastically ethereal. It lets you know you’re in a movie but it hypnotises you, using the very place the film occupies on the fantasy-reality line, to leave you with an unforgettable feeling. (Did that last part even make sense? Sorry, I’m rushing and thinking out loud, trying to express the level this movie hit me at.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 10:29 pm in 5 hearts, Movie Reviews. 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.