A few reviews

[TM2YC]

Wow, the hack job as better than any of the originals? Blasphemy!

I'd be interested in a fanedit that rescored film 2 with the SA synths, or dubbed SA back into Japanese.

I feel like you need to track down the final film then if you're including that one....

I've seen some lo-res clips and it doesn't look good to me (and looks nothing like a continuation or conclusion to the original 6 movies). If it gets remastered by Criterion or something I'll give it a spin but I'm not inclined to search the ends of the earth for it.

---

Rye Lane (2023)
I've got a lot to catch up with but this could easily be my favourite film of last year. Raine Allen-Miller has a refreshing new approach to the romcom featuring fantasy flashback interludes. Set around Rye Lane Market, Peckham and other areas of London, Allen-Miller captures the city in vibrant saturated multicolour with super distorted fish-eye lenses, wrapping our two love heroes around with quirky people and places. The soundtrack by Kwes is fab, I hadn't kept up with his stuff since the early 2010s EPs, so had no idea he was doing scoring. David Jonsson and Vivian Oparah are wonderful as two people who might feel like life isn't working but one joyful day changes their outlook.

---

Wham! (2023)
A very enjoyable documentary about pop duo 'Wham!' and George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley's friendship since they were kids at school. Director Chris Smith employs the trademarked Asif Kapadia technique of using no to-camera interviews, just period footage and the pair telling their own story. This allows George and Andrew to feel like they are ageless and/or still live, maybe sitting together in the same fantasy recording booth reminiscing. I had no idea they were so young, scoring several top-10 singles before they even hit 20. The fame they achieved at that age must have been a total head trip. The fast pace of the doc does sometimes feel superficial, gliding past important details in a "so we recorded our first album and then after that we..." type of way.

 

[TM2YC]

El Conde (2023)
A black comedy featuring Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as an immortal vampire, with his story narrated by his bestie Margaret Thatcher (voiced by Stella Gonet). The flying nun sequence is worth seeing on it's own. Future Directors of Superman movies take note, this is how it should be done! But beyond the beautiful moody black & white cinematography and amusing weirdness of the whole premise, I'm not really sure what point it's trying to make?

---

The Creator (2023)
I don't know if I was just distracted by 'The Creator's deranged decision to employ the modern fads for having shots painfully under-lit and having half of the film out of focus, at the same time as using the old Ultra Panavision 70 super-wide 'Ben-Hur' aspect-ratio, to show you the full panorama of what you'd have liked to be able to see, or if the story is just not very well told, but I was a bit confused by the plot at first. I didn't even realise that the Nomad thing was huge and in space until half way through when a newscaster says it. When the film finally gets into the "child fugitive and unlikely protector" lane I got quite invested in the two characters. I'll admit it, John David Washington wasn't terrible in this, which was a shame because the prospect of him spoiling another high-concept Sci-Fi original, with his wooden acting and zero charisma, is what put me off seeing this at the cinema. Whatever the flaws of the story and directing, there is a wonderfully rich imagined world on display, even if it reminds you a bit to much of other things like 'The Terminator' and 'Dues Ex'.

 

[mnkykungfu]

John David Washington wasn't terrible in this, ... with his wooden acting and zero charisma

I mean....yeah...but he was the worst actor in a film that features robots and children. I kept thinking how much better this movie would have been with another lead actor, as I do for literally all his films. Imagine Ryan Gosling in the lead. Michael Fassbender. Daniel Kaluuya. Mahershala Ali. Gael Garcia Bernal. Oscar Isaac. I'm having trouble imagining leading men who would've made the movie worse!

 

[TM2YC]

I mean....yeah...but he was the worst actor in a film that features robots and children. I kept thinking how much better this movie would have been with another lead actor, as I do for literally all his films. Imagine Ryan Gosling in the lead. Michael Fassbender. Daniel Kaluuya. Mahershala Ali. Gael Garcia Bernal. Oscar Isaac. I'm having trouble imagining leading men who would've made the movie worse!

No doubt there were better choices (and yeah wow, Ali would've been amazing! nice pick) but he didn't ruin the movie like in 'BlacKkKlansman' and 'Tenet', he was adequately not terrible in 'The Creator'.

---

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (2023)
An innovative and playful approach to a biopic documentary. The makers have trawled through the film and TV back catalogue of Michael J. Fox and found old scenes and lines that appear to be him talking about his own life when recontextualised. It made me want to watch more of his work, because I hadn't realised (probably because I've watched 'Back to the Future' a billion times) that outside of the BttF trilogy and 'Spin City' I've only seen 4 or 5 of his other movies. You feel the euphoria during the bit in the doc where it recreates his elation when first walking into the BttF gig, with it's magical score.

 

[TM2YC]

Flamin' Hot (2023)
Much like in 2015 with David O. Russell's 'Joy', when I couldn't believe Hollywood made a biopic about a mop salesperson, and that it got nominated for an Oscar and that it was actually okay, in 2023 Eva Longoria has directed an Oscar nominated biopic about the creation of a crisp flavouring. Every detail of the screenplay smells like total bullsh*t and from reading up afterwards, it probably is, but 'Flamin' Hot' is a very likeable, upbeat, triumph-over-adversity movie. I'll probably have forgotten it all by tomorrow but it put a smile on my face for 99-minutes.

---

Nimona (2023)
A pleasant enough Netflix animated movie that does that frustrating thing that 'Elemental' and other animations have done, where they put a lot of time and creativity into crafting a vast, potentially fascinating, fantasy world, but in order to make it "more relatable", they just make the world exactly like 2023 America. So in this future-medieval world, they don't drink mead and eat pheasant, they eat pizza, drink beer and ride the subway to their office jobs... er but in chain mail. Nimona is an annoying, non-stop, motor-mouth, sarcastic, wise-cracking, comedy character. When she's not talking for a few brief seconds, you're able to enjoy watching Riz Ahmed's more nuanced Knight Ballister. The shapeshifting escape sequence from the Institute building is pretty cool and inventive. The behind-the-scenes story is perhaps more interesting as there is the suspicion that Disney, after it's Fox merger, rather than deal with the angry internet fallout of either releasing, censoring, cancelling, or continuing a 75%-finished openly and proudly LGBT animated film, they just closed the whole of the 34-year old, critically and commercially successful, multi-billion dollar Blue Sky Studios, claiming it was financially "no longer sustainable". So Netlfix & Annapurna picked up the tab and seemingly didn't sanitise it, so the main characters are gay, what of it?

^ LOL at the special little extra youtube joke at the end of this trailer.

 

[TM2YC]

The Old Oak (2023)
The third in what feels like a trilogy of “state of the nation” (with the euphemistic emphasis on the word “state”) films by Ken Loach. Perhaps the best of the three, here he focuses on a depressed former mining village in Northern England, which is chosen to host families of Syrian refugees. Prejudice and resentment rears its ugly head but this is more about exploring how a strong sense of community which was shattered long ago, can still have it's embers rekindled again. Sometimes using non-actors or first-timers doesn’t work for me but I’ve rarely seen it work better. Dave Turner and Ebla Mari are so powerful and moving. The film was only spoiled for me by a shocking set dressing error, featuring a supposedly dilapidated room, that has a clapped out old boiler not used for decades, but was obviously a brand new Worcester Bosch Gas boiler, weathered with some brown paint to look old. The boiler is an important plot point, so whoops!

 

[mnkykungfu]

they just make the world exactly like 2023 America. ...Nimona is an annoying, non-stop, motor-mouth, sarcastic, wise-cracking, comedy character.

I could barely get through the trailer due to these two issues. I can only attribute the lavish praise of this film due to a groundswell of support for personal freedoms and Blue Sky. In almost every other way, it seems like everything I dislike about modern animated films, and there are at least 20-30 works coming out every year that are so much better than this, but most people don't even hear about. Animation is one category where awards shows consistently drop the ball in "getting the word out" about films.

 

[TM2YC]

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part One (2023)
(The dreadful first sequel by John Woo excepting) I don't mind the M:I film series, it's a poor-man's-Bond, that is usually quite entertaining, if forgettable, nothing I'd rush out to see. For once, a lot of other people seemed to agree and skipped this one at the cinema. 2 & 3/4 hours is far too long for this kind of nonsense. With a script that is endless repeats of "go to point A, to get item B but person C steals item B from person D, so person C, D and now E, have to go to point F, to steal back item B back from person C, who has now been kidnapped by person G etc" it doesn't need to be any length beyond a fun 90-minutes. The opening credits are still going 32-minutes in! (I thought 20-minutes in 'Fallout' was crazy). Some of the AI warfare stuff is genuinely interesting and alarming but other elements are written for dummies, like supposedly having to resort to CRT screens, instead of just not using networked devices (see 'Battlestar Galactica' 2004).

It suffers from the same problem as the John Wick franchise, where the world of the film no longer has real people in it, everybody is a secret super agent. At one point Tom Cruise leaps over two Gondalas in Venice and there is no comedic cutaways to the startled/annoyed faces of the gondoliers/passengers. It's like they are ghost Gondalas in a ghost Venice. Then again at the end Cruise says "We've got to stop this runaway train!" but the film forgets to show any passengers actually being saved by his efforts, as far as we know, the few passengers we did see all died. These are basics of action-movie shooting and editing. For all the talk of these films having "real stunts" (mixed in with the fake-a*s looking CGI), we need to see some real film-making. Having said that, the train sequence in question has an amazing domino carriages bit and there are several great action chases to enjoy, plus who doesn't love Hayley Atwell.

By the way. I recommend posting a review of Dead Reckoning on Letterboxd, something fun will happen .

---

Beyond Utopia (2023)
A tough but worthwhile watch. The footage from inside North Korea is grim enough but it's the crying children we watch trying to escape that hits the hardest. The grannie who seems to still be absolutely convinced by the NK propaganda after she's escaped would be hilarious, if it wasn't so scary. She looks genuinely wary that the "demonically evil" people from outside of NK who have helped her defect, are just pretending to be nice, and will surely kill her any second. If you thought it was bad, this documentary will probably convince you it's much, much worse.

---

Golda (2023)
I imagine reminding us that Golda Meir was originally Ukrainian, and showing her overseeing satellite photos of Russian (sponsored) tanks assembling on the border, was supposed to have parallels to current conflicts. But when this film was released to mark the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, they wouldn’t have known it would have more parallels, when a day later the 50th anniversary was also marked by a new bloody war. The feeling of an encircling existential threat is palpable in the film, thanks to fine performances and incredible use of horror-movie-like sound. It does look a bit cheap and set-bound, no doubt the use of real documentary exterior footage and mostly interior dialogue, was as much about saving on budget, as an artistic choice to convey suffocating fear and bunker paranoia. Lynn Cohen in Spielberg's 'Munich' set the golda-standard for me but Helen Mirren is good too.

 

[ArtisDead]

THE HOBBIT THE LEGENDARY EDIT
a fanedit by @Wraith

The Legendary Edit indeed! I like what @keithbk said. "Do we need another Hobbit edit?" If that refers to this edit, then yes!

I have watched so very many Hobbit edits. I went through various stages of thought. Each time one was released that I liked, I thought that it was the best. Each for a different reason. The first to really catch my attention was @spence's legendary edit. Cutting three movies down to an action packed thrill ride was quite a feat. Then there was the other legendary edits by @kerr, @L8wrtr, @AdamDens, @eldusto84 (Dustin Lee) and @M4_ .

Each had their own merits for consideration of being the best Hobbit edit. @Wraith even mentored the editor of the Battle of The Five Edits and played a large part in it's success. It is excellent and fits a niche. @Q2 and @TM2YC both released their three part edits. Both were incredible. I finally settled on @M4_'s edit being subjectively the best Hobbit edit for my preferences.

I viewed @Wraith's previous Hobbit edits and was acutely aware of just how much work he had put into them. Especially, the one from which this edit was derived. It was very close to being the masterpiece that this edit has become.

This edit is the perfect Hobbit edit. I know that is subjective. I'm serious. It is the perfect first movie to The Lord of The Rings. It's darker. It's more serious. It's less stupid. It's less bloated. I've watched it fifteen times now in it's various workprints and will continue to watch as the obsessive compulsive legend continues to tweak it. There are so many microcuts to improve the narrative that it boggles my mind. I know the movies so well that I catch all of them.

It's literally unlike any other Hobbit edit and it will become most Middle Earth fans' favorite Hobbit edit. I only hope that I am here to see it.

@Wraith you have outdone yourself! This is what fanediting is all about. The transformative power of skilled editing is on full display here.

I highly recommend this edit and thank you for creating this perfect Hobbit edit for us.

 

[TM2YC]

May December (2023)
Horribly uncomfortable viewing in a very good and darkly comic way. I found myself shouting at the characters "No, no, don't do it!" at a couple of points. I'm not always a fan of Natalie Portman's "big" performances but she is subtle and sinister here but the real star isn't her, or Julianne Moore, it's Charles Melton, who'd I'd never heard of before. The piano theme was driving me nuts because it seemed so familiar, until I had to pause and look it up, discovering it's an adaptation of Michel Legrand's score for 1971's 'The Go-Between'. Tip to US film-makers, not everybody outside the US knows what "7th grader" means, so maybe don't exclusively use that term in your film where knowing somebody's age at a certain point is a really big deal in your plot (again the pause button and Google resolved my confusion).

---

20 Days in Mariupol (2023)
A fascinating and harrowing vision of war. It's the first 20-days of the siege of Mariupol filmed by Mstyslav Chernov, chronologically from the first bombs dropping, to the day he had to flee, showing it go from a living city, to a decimated wasteland. For most of the time Chernov can't find a signal to get his film/story out to the world. We know because we're watching it, that he succeeded but you can still feel his fear. If you can't deal with footage of dead babies and mass graves in astonishing high-definition then avoid.

 

[TM2YC]

Pasolini (2014)
Abel Ferrara takes an unusual biopic tack to portray the last days of Director Pier Paolo Pasolini, leading up to his brutal murder. Pasolini's working routine as he writes a new film, is mixed in with dramatisations of his unfinished ideas and even dramatisations of stories that the characters within the ideas are describing. Sometimes it worked for me, sometimes it didn't but Willem Dafoe is always worth watching.

---

Is There Anybody Out There? (2023)
Director Ella Glendining makes a long-form video-diary documentary about her life and journey to try and find others in the world with similar disabilities to her own fantastically rare condition. She strongly puts across her belief that she's perfect the way she is and confronts the drastic surgeries you can have to "fix" disabled people. Thought provoking and beautiful.

 

[Ender]

Just saw Battle Royale. It was alright, but the context for the titular event didn’t really make any sense, or at least wasn’t explained well enough. Why are they sending teenagers to fight to the death? It’s in secret so it’s not sending any kind of message to the populace. The brief opening text just said something about student strikes that didn’t logically follow to this endpoint.
The ending was also bizarre. The first ending where

Reveal message

the guy says Reiko was made up and kills the couple felt like the perfect natural ending

, but then they shoehorn in a happy ending. It reminds me of the time I saw a stage play of And Then There Were None and it ended with

Reveal message

the hero actually being alive and coming to the rescue of the love interest and killing the villain

. It just felt like a spit in the face. Okay, well the stage play did. This I’m a lot more lenient on, but I still feel the first ending is better.
Also, the English dub was pretty bad, but try as I might I could find any subbed version anywhere. Eventually I got over it but it was a rough start.

 

[mnkykungfu]

Just saw Battle Royale. It was alright, but the context for the titular event didn’t really make any sense, or at least wasn’t explained well enough. Why are they sending teenagers to fight to the death? It’s in secret so it’s not sending any kind of message to the populace. The brief opening text just said something about student strikes that didn’t logically follow to this endpoint.
The ending was also bizarre. The first ending where

Reveal message

the guy says Reiko was made up and kills the couple felt like the perfect natural ending

, but then they shoehorn in a happy ending. It reminds me of the time I saw a stage play of And Then There Were None and it ended with

Reveal message

the hero actually being alive and coming to the rescue of the love interest and killing the villain

. It just felt like a spit in the face. Okay, well the stage play did. This I’m a lot more lenient on, but I still feel the first ending is better.
Also, the English dub was pretty bad, but try as I might I could find any subbed version anywhere. Eventually I got over it but it was a rough start.

Maybe you got bad subtitles?
Admittedly, there's a lot of Japanese historical-cultural context that's relevant to this and may be hard to vibe with if you don't know and didn't look it up. Principally that when the "bubble economy" burst in Japan, there was an immediate uptick in crime, and also increased attention on already-prevalent juvenile crime. "Bosozoku" gangs were becoming so widespread that they were getting out of control in Tokyo (as you see in Akira) and high-school gangs, violent petty crime, and middle-school prostitution rings were all on the rise. You can see this stuff influencing lots of anime even up to present day, and Japanese films started addressing it as well by the end of the '90s. Hence, the idea at the start of Battle Royale that the government abruptly passes an act to curb juvenile delinquency, and the first group to find out is the one we see at the start.

One year later, the next supposed juvenile delinquents have been gathered. I don't know where you got the idea that this is all in secret. It's official government policy. They don't televise it or anything, but it is known. The purpose of the BR program is supposedly to make kids behave and simultaneously to test out the military's program (tactics, etc.). Now that I think about it, I guess what could be confusing is that it's all absurdist and hypocritical. Their "teacher", Takeshi Kitano, makes no bones about telling them what it really is. They're all going to die (except one) and there's no rhyme or reason to it. In fact, as we learn more about these kids, we discover most of them aren't delinquents at all. It's random. Ironically, the oppression by the Japanese government is what forces some of them to become bad.

It's an anti-authoritarian, anti-fascist film. At the end, the kids resolve to try to bring down the government. They realize that their orderly society was just a system of control, and that they were being terrorized by their own government. Ironically, the government calls them terrorists. The film was condemned by the Japanese diet at the time, and was denied international theatrical release (which is why The Hunger Games didn't have to worry about plagiarism lawsuits) out of embarrassment. Anti-establishment films are very rare in Japan...it's not too bad if they're just novels or manga, but films are too visible. This movie was even changed from the novel, with them writing that intro to try to say the government was "curbing delinquency". In the novel, it's just directly stated that this is a system to terrorize and oppress the youth. People are selected for the program because they listen to rock music or dye their hair or wear too-short skirts...all normal teenage rebellion things, but the government wants to force everyone to CONFORM. You see this in the film too, but iirc they don't actually say it, it's just there as examples for some characters.

 

[TM2YC]

The Color Purple (2023)
Steven Spielberg's 1985 version wasn't one of his top masterpieces but I preferred it to this. I don't think it's that a story with this many harrowing themes can't work as a big musical (the towering 'Les Miserables' for one example), it's just that these songs, presented in this way don't work for me. You could probably edit out all the musical numbers and the story would lose nothing. The dramatic scenes between the songs are very well acted and directed, they've got all the drama and character development the film needs, the songs simply awkwardly repeat the sentiments again. In a great musical it should be the other way around, the songs should be where the characters express themselves and the talking should be the linking material. The hazy sunlight of Dan Laustsen's cinematography is stunning though.

Look at how powerful this dramatic scene is:

This musical scene adds almost nothing but razzmatazz:

 

[Ender]

Maybe you got bad subtitles?

Do you really think anytime someone doesn't understand a movie it's because they watched a botched copy? It's possible to just not understand things sometimes.

Admittedly, there's a lot of Japanese historical-cultural context that's relevant to this and may be hard to vibe with if you don't know and didn't look it up. Principally that when the "bubble economy" burst in Japan, there was an immediate uptick in crime, and also increased attention on already-prevalent juvenile crime. "Bosozoku" gangs were becoming so widespread that they were getting out of control in Tokyo (as you see in Akira) and high-school gangs, violent petty crime, and middle-school prostitution rings were all on the rise. You can see this stuff influencing lots of anime even up to present day, and Japanese films started addressing it as well by the end of the '90s. Hence, the idea at the start of Battle Royale that the government abruptly passes an act to curb juvenile delinquency, and the first group to find out is the one we see at the start.

Literally none of that is ever even hinted at in the film. They just say "unemployment high, students protest, hunger games". There's no indication of any sort of uptick in delinquency.

I don't know where you got the idea that this is all in secret.

The teacher asks all the students if they know what the "Battle Royale Act" is and literally none of them do. How would none of them have heard of such violent thing that could affect them personally if it's public knowledge?

The purpose of the BR program is supposedly to make kids behave

How??!! There's no indication in the film that bad behavior leads to being in the Battle Royale. If they were picking the worst delinquents from across the country than sure but the way it's presented they just seem to pick some random class of relatively well-adjusted kids.

In fact, as we learn more about these kids, we discover most of them aren't delinquents at all. It's random.

That was pretty obvious from the get go, which is why the idea that it's supposed to punish delinquents never even crossed my mind.

At the end, the kids resolve to try to bring down the government.

That never came across. As far as I could tell they were just going on the run and that was that.

People are selected for the program because they listen to rock music or dye their hair or wear too-short skirts...all normal teenage rebellion things, but the government wants to force everyone to CONFORM. You see this in the film too, but iirc they don't actually say it, it's just there as examples for some characters.

I literally didn't see any of that.

If all they want to do is get a bunch of random kids killed in secret, it'd be a whole lot simpler to use a firing squad. You haven't provided a single reason for them to specifically organize battle royales that the public cannot watch.

 

[mnkykungfu]

Do you really think anytime someone doesn't understand a movie it's because they watched a botched copy? It's possible to just not understand things sometimes.

No, that's why I said "maybe" with a question mark.

You haven't provided a single reason

And I'm really not interested in "providing you reasons". I'm not trying to fight you or win an argument. Sorry you didn't get the movie. I wrote quite a lot trying to provide cultural context as, yes, the film is made for a Japanese audience that 場の空気を読む, basically "reads the air/reads between the lines". Many Japanese films are hard to fully understand without doing some digging about the time and situation they were made in. They're often very topical, and not made with an international audience in mind. Deep investment, deep rewards. But if it's not clicking with you and you don't care enough to dig on your own, I'm certainly not going to try to fight to make you appreciate the film. If you thought that was what I was doing and so you needed to push back, you got the wrong idea. I was just trying to help.

 

[TM2YC]

Fallen Leaves (2023)
A romcom but the com is wonderfully dry and deadpan, while the rom is suffused with loneliness, depression and alcoholism. When their lives are this bleak, you really yearn for these two people to fall in love. Aki Kaurismaki creates a timeless visual world, that's a bit 80s Soviet, a bit 30s Hollywood, and a bit 60s French New Wave, yet set in the modern world of zero hours work and radio reports on the war in Ukraine. What a wonderful final line!

 

[Ender]

I'm not trying to fight you or win an argument.

Me neither. I was just trying to gain as much as understanding of the material as you could provide me with, as you seem to understand it far better than I do. I appreciate you trying to explain it to me even if I still get any of it. It's worth noting I'm also really bad with arthouse movies. My media literacy is...strange.

 

[TM2YC]

The Holdovers (2023)
Alexander Payne's 'Sideways' was instantly one of my favourite films when it hit cinemas. But for whatever reason I've skipped over the three films Payne made in the two decades since then. So watching 'The Holdovers' today was like diving right back in to a tonal semi-sequel, like Paul Giamatti and Payne always work together. It's crazy to read afterwards that co-star Dominic Sessa has not been in a film before, because he's next to the seasoned Giamatti the whole time, on the same stellar performance level. The fidelity of the 70s aesthetic works so well, including the style, the feel, titles, AR and soundtrack choices, you could really believe this was made in the year it was set. I was also surprised to read it was not shot on film, it can look so convincing now. The perfect film if you love a heart-warming Christmas time tale but you're also a cranky Scrooge.

 

[TM2YC]

All of Us Strangers (2023)
The daring concept of having a guy seeming to semi-literally travel back in time to talk with his dead parents when they are young (rather than use traditional flashbacks), works surprisingly naturally. It's because the emotional baggage being unpacked feels so real and honest, that it doesn't matter if the presentation of those ideas is not, plus it allows for some unusual cross generational dialogue that could not happen otherwise. Paul Mescal is an amazingly subtle and talented actor and this is no exception (Jamie Bell is incredible too) but main star Andrew Scott can be dreadful and over the top (his performance in 'Spectre' might be the worst ever in the Bond franchise), but I have to admit he bowled me over here. Unfortunately I worked out where the plot was going halfway through but by then I cared so much about the characters that I was desperately hoping I was wrong. The final image does leave the film open to a different interpretation on another plain of reality. The musical choices have so much meaning and they're some of my personal all-time favourite songs.

---

The Zone of Interest (2023)
If you thought 2015's 'Son of Saul' was just too mainstream an approach to tackling Auschwitz, then give the experimental 'The Zone of Interest' a go. I thought it was powerful and challenging but others I saw it with had more of a "what the hell did I just watch?!?" reaction. The several minutes of sound collage played over a black screen which opens the film is there to prime you for listening intently and thinking about what you are being shown. If you're not engaged by the film, the final shots might just be a stair case, but they looked like a decent into hell to me. If you aren't prepared to answer those questions yourself, then the film isn't going to do much for you. It's not about what you are shown, or about what the (real life) characters are saying (when there is dialogue), it about their implications for those things not seen. The wife Hedwig Höss giving a house tour and saying "the first thing we did was install central heating because it's so cold here" would be an irrelevant filler detail in any thing else, here it's a damning illustration of these people's evil. I somehow found it more shocking when the wife was doing things like casually threatening the maid with extermination, or pretending to not have heard screams of torture, rather than knowing exactly what the husband Rudolf Höss is doing all day. However monstrous it is, it's his job (even if he enjoyed sadistic murder), were as she's under no obligation whatsoever to be cruel, pitiless and vampyric. The use of sound is very important to the film, so I recommend viewing this at the cinema if possible, where the subtle, chilling noises can swirl around you in the dark.

The only clip I can find of the startling score is this:

It reminded me a bit of Goblin's score for 'Suspiria'.