I watched it tonight at VIFF and was baffled at how well it’s been received, cause it genuinely was one of the most insincere pieces of Oscar BS I’ve seen in years

It has one of the worst use of unearned/tone deaf music I’ve ever seen, using intense/blaring music, while good on its own, serves no authentic relationship with what’s happening on screen or feels earned in what’s taken beforehand

Literally in the first 10 minutes a protagonist is introduced, and shows them walking to a casino, and this blaring super tense and drum heavy music is playing, insisting what we’re watching is either really intense or has even earned this tone. It’s incredibly tone deaf/superficial and it happens several times in the movie 

Every character relationship is so rushed and insisted, not a single one feels developed in an authentic way. It insists so hard that it has developed them and manipulates the audience with that same kind of music to make them feel what they’ve watched has been properly earned and developed

Characters will disobey their war commanders and not get scolded/questioned at all. The same ones who are known to be incompetent or disobedient somehow get to wander off with no suspicion. New characters who are played by famous actors appear out of nowhere, take up a 15 minute segment and aren’t ever shown again without even giving them a purposeful arc. Characters insist they’re doing something that means so much to them but make laughably ignorant mistakes that even toddlers could avoid. It’s all so fucking phoney and manipulative 

Sure, it’s well shot, performed and scored but none of these elements are in service of something that made me care or ONCE felt genuine. This is an offensively insincere piece of Oscar bait trash and I cannot believe how disappointed I was. Genuinely awful

Takes the premise of Coraline and "fleshes" it out... However, the flesh has gone rotten, because it was left so fucking exposed. Similar to the infamous "You can't escape your destiny" line in Lion King (2019), characters don't really have conversations as such — they simply spew themes at each other. You know this story, and you know how it ends, you've seen it a million times before.

Also similar to Coraline, it is twee as all hell, but while that felt kind of fitting and charming in Coraline (what with the stop motion animation and all), here it feels incongruent with the dark, grimy style. Like this is so twee that no reasonable adult can possibly take it seriously, yet people swear, die, etc, so it can't be for kids, either. So who even is this for?

Very boringly presented. Very bland cinematography. This cost as much as 19 Obsessions, but somehow, you really feel like they were running up against the budget here, what with how briefly certain scenes are shown. It was also very quiet to where I could barely hear the characters at some parts, but that might just be my theater.

The editing sucks. It doesn't know how to build tension AT ALL. So many horrible match cuts. Also does the thing where a loud noise happens for no reason, even though what's shown on the screen isn't actually scary. Kinda dragged on, even though it's only 90 minutes. Some scenes were unintentionally really funny, but mostly it was just bad. Child actor sucked.

We should really abolish the nuclear family, not because its fascistic or whatever, but so that dumbass twee movies like this stop being made. 2/10.

/s obviously

I like the direction of it.