An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since it was starring Willem Dafoe and since it was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out. Dafoe is a prolific character actor, very often making 4 or 5 movies a year, but it’s not very often that he gets to play the lead and, only therefore, it is actually worth watching this movie. In fact, it went even further than that since he was pretty much the only actor in this minimalistic piece. So, it was definitely pretty cool to see a movie focusing only on this brilliant actor and he surely didn’t disappoint. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie was not great though. Basically, they gave us 3 modes, the main character was looking for food and water, the main character was trying to escape and the main character was basically losing his freaking mind and they basically switched endlessly between these 3 modes which got old pretty quickly. The other issue was that, during all these phases, there was no evolution whatsoever and, to make things worse, we learned nothing about the guy who didn’t seem to evolve much during this ordeal. I think the makers tried to show that by destroying/rebuilding this fancy apartment full of Art pieces, it became a brand-new piece of Art and the guy was giving some kind of performance Art without an audience, except for us, the viewers. It’s my guess but, even so, I still didn’t really care about the end-result. I thought it was also rather frustrating that the main character didn’t spend more time to escape (especially since he did manage eventually to get out). It was also hardly convincing that such a seemingly professional robber wouldn’t have more tools when going on a job and why on Earth didn’t he have a cell phone? Anyway, to conclude, I think I’m rather generous with my rating here but I still think it is worth a look if only to spend 100+ mins with only Willem Dafoe.

6/10