Repulsion

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I don't feel like I gave this one a fair chance. The movie wasn't engaging me, so I kept losing my focus and flat out stopped paying attention at points. Not showing a lot of kommitment, I know, but I wasn't enjoying myself.

So I'm probably not qualified to say too much about it, other than what I saw wasn't working for me. It's an early Roman Polanski horror movie, and I'll admit to general ignorance of his work, but for some reason I thought this would be a good place to start. Other than maybe a couple of cool shots and ideas, I thought this was a bore, and I'm rarely one to criticize a movie for being boring. Hell, I'm the guy who's a big fan of Gus Van Sant's Last Days and who thought Werckmeister Harmonies was pretty cool.

There's a girl, and she's a prude about sex, and not much interesting happens for a long time, and then her sister goes on a vacation and she's left alone in her apartment. She starts to go crazy or something, but in a very slow, uninteresting way, and eventually kills some people in a handful of awkwardly staged scenes. I got the sense that this was trying to be an artier horror film, which I'm all for, but it's not very interesting. It tries to imply all this subtextual, subconscious sexual stuff going on with the main character in an attempt at depth, but none of it makes the movie scary. I mean, I could care less if her insanity stems from her deep seated psycho/sexual issues when her insanity is so tedious. All the "depth" in the world doesn't make this a scary movie.

But like I said, I lost my concentration a lot during this movie a feel like I missed quite a bit. Maybe if I had been more into it, I would have noticed more details I liked, or notice that it created a mood, or whatever.