Merry-Go-Round
Made me feel the same way I felt watching <PERSON>’ Husbands, which is that it’s every tic and theme and vibe I love in a director’s body of work but stripped of a structure or reason to exist, so it ends up more exhausting than enjoyable. There are three movies pulling you in different directions at once: there’s a conspiracy thriller about a woman sending a mysterious note to her ex-boyfriend and sister then getting kidnapped for Knowing Too Much about her father’s fake death, there’s a romance about the sister and ex-boyfriend falling in love while following the convoluted and irrelevant conspiracy threads, and there’s a pseudo-fantasy world more in line with <PERSON> and <PERSON> in which that ex-boyfriend is silently fleeing an unknown woman and a knight on horseback through forests and deserts. 80
I love the latter two and kind of hate the first one! The appeal of these <PERSON> movies to me has always been that the paranoia is primarily there as ambiance and the details of the conspiracy are less important than the “is someone after them or are they imagining it…” feeling. When so much of the movie is dedicated to expository dialogue it becomes clear how thin the plot is and most importantly how boring it all feels. Still found a lot to love and <PERSON> + <PERSON> rock, but very mid-tier <PERSON> in <PERSON>’s opinion! 698