Top 10 - an eclectic selection from a not-so-frequent film reviewer

It's been another hectic year where duties at the Australian Film Institute have sucked up most of my time and required me to watch a LOT of Australian features, documentaries, shorts and television dramas. I'm not complaining. Love it! But it makes my top ten a little skewed. Nevertheless, I managed to catch some festivals, some screeners, and even the odd regular film screening (radical!). Here's what I selected for my yearly wrap-up of films for The Big Issue magazine (edn. 396). Apart from the standout, they're in no particular order. They were selected from films that were on general release in Australia during 2011.

Standout Film: Melancholia

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia may well be the most perfect film ever made about the end of the world. The extended opening sequence, a masterpiece in itself, places the solemn strains of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde alongside extreme slow motion images that are gravely beautiful and strange: a huge green golf course overlooking the ocean; a sad and beautiful bride, floating dreamlike in a pond; a black horse sinking into the earth; and two planets, seen from space, on a collision course for disaster.

In a change of tone, the film reverts to the realistic and blackly comedic tone we expect from von Trier, as the newly married bride (Kirsten Dunst) and groom (Alexander Skarsgaard) giggle and kiss in the back of a ridiculously long stretch limo, which the driver is failing to maneuver around a bend. The seemingly happy couple is destined for a hideous wedding reception – complete with obnoxious guests and squabbling relatives (John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling play the bride’s monstrously bitter parents). But the main problem is the bride. She’s suffering from a malaise that makes the term ‘depression’ seem like a picnic. Meanwhile, the bride’s sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is worrying about the rogue planet that’s moving closer and closer to Earth.

A grand and exhilarating work, Melancholia never abandons the human elements. The closing scenes are bound to have you in tears, reaching for the hand of a loved one.

Brad Pitt is the enigmatic patriarch in Tree of Life.

Tree of Life

Another hugely ambitious film about the grand state of things (including more magnificent images from space), Terrence Malick’s masterpiece tackles life, the universe, faith, grace and innocence. Tree of Life frustrated those who need a straight, clear narrative thread, but for lovers of beauty and mystery, this was one of the year’s must-see films.

Red Dog

The Australian blockbuster of the year, Red Dog was a nostalgic but knowing tale of a dog that united a West Australian mining community in the 1970s. Funny, heartwarming and accessible for all ages, this was true family filmmaking. Let’s have more of it.

Mad Bastards

Another film set in spectacular north western Australia, Mad Bastards was an uplifting musical journey about an estranged father and son, with a catchy toe-tapping score from the Pigram Brothers. Set in the heart of a contemporary Indigenous community the film was hopeful without ever shying away from reality.

Bridesmaids

Hordes of laugh-hungry women warmed to this story of a single thirty-something chick struggling to cope with her best friend’s wedding plans. Like Sex and the City’s wrinkly but more likeable cousin, Bridesmaids had heart and soul – and some genuinely fat people in it.

Hanna

Part fairytale, part assassin thriller, Hanna was blood-pumpingly exciting chase tale. Saoirse Ronan shone as the flaxen-haired teen killer taught to survive by her father (Eric Bana), and hunted relentlessly by a red-haired Secret Service witch (Cate Blanchett). A jolly good action ride, all powered by a stunning Chemical Brothers soundtrack.

Saoirse Ronan in Hanna.

Bill Cunningham New York

An audience favourite around the world, this zesty documentary created an unlikely spiritual hero - the octogenarian bike-riding fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, whose passion and pursuit of beauty has an inspired and pure quality about it.

Jane Eyre

Mia Wasikowska was the perfect Jane Eyre in this adaptation of the beloved Bronte book. Serious and interestingly plain, her face lit up with genuine love and beauty when she encountered her glowering and mysterious Rochester (Michael Fassbender). This gets my vote for Best Sexual Chemistry on Screen this year. 

Passionate moments in Jane Eyre.

Autoluminescent: Rowland S Howard

Certainly one of the year’s best music documentaries, this portrait of singer/songwriter Rowland S. Howard depicted not only a talented, self-aware and articulate individual, but a fascinating era in Melbourne’s early punk scene, with great interviews from the likes of Nick Cave, Mick Harvey and Wim Wenders.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

An excellent adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s bestselling book, this film succeeded in conveying the puzzles and ambiguities at the heart of the novel: Are killers born or made? And what part does a mother have in making them so? A strange kind of maternal love story with Tilda Swinton as the mother of the ‘monster’.

So there they are. 

Below are some others not mentioned in the magazine wrap.

Honorable mentions to Source Code, Winter's Bone, The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Blue Valentine, Julia Leigh's erotic fairytale, Sleeping Beauty, Ivan Sen's heartbreaking but humourous Indigenous tale, Toomelah, the very under-seen Australian thriller set at sea, Caught Inside; and The Trip with a memorable turn from Steve Coogan, but too many funny voices and impressions for my liking.

Highlights from festival films, one-off screenings and DVDs: Xavier Dolan's I Killed My Mother and Heartbeats; Amiel Courtin-Wilson's extraordinary Hail; John Curran's much maligned Stone; the already awarded Irananian drama A Separation; the beautiful documentary about Sydney dancer Tanja Liedke, Life in Movement; and the surprising and frank French drama set in a police child protection unit, Polisse. I was thrilled too, to see on the big screen Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast - though the final scenes made me giggle at the now-dated special effects and costumes.

Heartbeats - from the precociously talented and beautiful Xavier Dolan

Greatest disappointments and bores: Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and Wim Wenders Pina (I know, controversial!). Also, went to sleep in Kung Fu Panda 2, The Hunter (should I admit that? Might get me fired) and The Cup. 

Here's to another year of films. Happy New Year!  

Rochelle Siemienowicz

The Year in Films: 2011

We all know that the whole point of these "Year's best and worst" lists is to get you all annoyed that your fave films didn't make the list while I get even more angry that I wasted so much of my life watching rubbish. So in an attempt to defuse the hate, let's loosely group the year's best and worst into vague categories rather than singling out individuals for the love… or the hate. So to kick off this (content-free) list (united by my vague emotional feelings towards various films rather than rigorous argument) with the love, 2011 was a good year for...

1): Westerns: True Grit / Meek’s Cutoff. Very different films – the former a traditional western, the latter a sedate look at a wagon train that’s hopelessly lost - but both used the landscape of the America west to unsettling effect.

2): Social degeneracy: Kaboom / Limitless. One’s about sex, the other’s about drugs, and they both say their respective vices are good and fun. Hurrah!

3): Dancing: Black Swan / Footloose. One involves dancing to feel good. The other… doesn’t.

4): Superheroes: Captain America / X Men: First Class / Fast & Furious 5 / Rise of the Planet of the Apes / 13 Assassins. Yes, Caesar the ape in Rise counts. So does Vin Diesel. And the samurai in the overlooked but amazingly action-packed 13 Assassins.

5): Comedy: Bridesmaids / The Trip. Yes, Bridesmaids was a massive hit (and rightly so), but for mine the Steve Coogan vs Rob Brydon battle of the Michael Caine impersonations was the funniest thing this year.

6): Spirituality: Higher Ground / Tree of Life / 127 Hours. Hey, if sawing your own arm off doesn’t put you in touch with a higher power, what will?

7): People dying: Fright Night / Source Code / Senna. The first was a great re-working of a horror classic; the second was a video game that reset every time our hero failed to defuse the bomb; the third was a brilliant documentary about a race car driver that… well, you can guess how that story ends.

8): Robots: Drive / Real Steel / Hanna. Okay, only the boxing robots in Real Steel were actual robots. But the leads in the other two were so blank (and so efficient at killing), it’s hard to credit them with humanity.

9): Woody Allen: Midnight in Paris. Hey, it’s nice to see Woody get one right after his hit and miss run of late.

10): Best film of the year: Take Shelter. Because this story of a man either losing his mind or having visions of the end of the world is one of the most haunting and terrifying things I’ve seen in a long, long time.

But just in case you were thinking 2011 was the dawn of some kind of new golden age of cinema, rest assured the stench of utter rubbish continued to billow out of cinemas at a steady rate. Especially cinemas screening the following, for which it was a very bad year…

1): Comedies about f**k buddies: No Strings Attached / Friends With Benefits. Because there’s no possible way to guess how all this is ever going to work out.

2): Comedies about anything else: Horrible Bosses / What’s Your Number: Yes, they contained the occasional laugh. With so much good comedy around, they didn’t have enough.

3): Young people: I Am Number 4 / Wasted on the Young / Abducted. Kids: either they’re on the run from aliens, on the run from spies, or on the run from their own despair at being super-rich yet socially isolated.

4): Sequels: Johnny English Reborn / Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Oh good, it’s another chance to get it right… that these films totally threw away.

5): Remakes: Arthur / The Thing / The Mechanic. What better way to salute the classics of the past than by turning them into slightly more polished turds?

6): Musicals: Sucker Punch / A Heartbeat Away. While Sucker Punch was a musical without the music; A Heartbeat Away was… just terrible. Another low point for Australian film

7): The olden days: Red Riding Hood / Burke & Hare. It seems that in the past, people were even worse actors than they are today. Nice outfits though.

8): Jim Carrey: Mr Popper’s Penguins. And the schmaltzy kids’ movie genre claims another once-great comedian. By the look in his eyes, he knows it too.

9): Cowboys & Aliens: Cowboys & Aliens. Two great tastes that taste like aimless, dull crap together.

10): Worst film of the year: Anonymous. Yes, there were others - many others - that were more painful or misguided or stupid. But this sloppy, meandering, pointless take on “what if Shakespeare was, uh, someone else” was the most boring film for 2011. And I’ll forgive a film anything but being boring.

Anthony Morris (this appeared in Forte #523)

To Infinity and Beyond: The end of the end of Harry Potter

No-one would begrudge an eight-movie series the right to slap on a coda or two after finally wrapping up the story proper. The Lord of the Rings series had roughly half-a-dozen "endings" one after the other before the credits finally ran. But the final scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows pt 2 is a different kettle of fish from the conclusions to LotR or, say, The Matrix trilogy.

In case you haven't seen it yet, or read the books, or figured it out for yourself, after Voldemort is killed and his forces defeated... actually, ever wondered why villains are constantly killing off their underlings? It's because if they don't, the good guys will have to do the job (if Hitler had killed off his henchmen for failing him, we wouldn't have needed the Nuremberg Trials) and no-one wants to see Harry Potter shoveling bodies into a mass grave. So anyway, Voldemort is dead, the day is saved, and then suddenly it's 19 years later and we get to see the all-grown-up-and-married-off heroes somewhat glumly escorting their own offspring on their way to Hogwarts. Life goes on, the cycle continues, parents are boring, and so on.

The dodgy make-up and uncertain temporal location aside (are they 19 years in the future? was the whole series set 19 years in the past? will they ever get mobile phones?), this ending seems a bit... off. Sagas that have a firm ending either have a short coda that basically says "it's all over - or is it?" (The Matrix model) or trail off trying to tie up each and every loose end (The Lord of the Rings).

This one does neither, and while "happily ever after" pretty much sums it up, why be so specific as to everyone's future? Surely just having the characters hold hands and stare off into the dawn of a new day would get the job done just as well, especially considering many Potter fans would have widely diverging ideas of what an "happily ever after" ending would be. Some people might want to image Harry settling down, others might want him to continue battling evil, still more might want to think of him as a pathetic drunk living in the past; why nail his future down so firmly?

This ending (and yes, it is greatly reduced from the book, which details their careers as well as their relationships) seems largely designed to shut down any speculation by readers /viewers as to What Happens Next. The story itself is over, but the characters aren't free: their futures have to be firmly mapped out by the rights-holders to keep them under control. After seven novels and eight films, Warner Brothers and J.K. Rowling aren't letting them go that easily.

It may not stick, of course. Literature and film is full of "endings" that didn't quite take - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle brought Sherlock Holmes back from the dead in the face of popular demand, while being staked at the end of Dracula hasn't stopped the vampire from returning over and over again. But they were created in the days before corporations realised copyright over successful characters was the gift that keeps on giving.

Even as the internet provides a massive boost to unauthorized fanfic and slash fiction (so very, very much of it set in the Potterverse), the official version refuses to let a second of its' characters' lives go uncharted. Rather than letting Potter live on wild and free in the minds of fans, the series lurches forward after it's clearly all said and done, staggering onwards into a totally unnecessary and uninspired future simply to make sure no-one else comes along with a better idea.

Anthony Morris

Cane Toads: The Conquest

Well over a year since Avatar made it a must for blockbusters, 3D remains a controversial process. Often jacking up the ticket price for little visual reward, it’s constantly on the verge of reverting to the gimmick it was back in the 1950s. So what better way to champion the process and remind people of its full potential than to use it to film a whole bunch of cane toads on the march?

In this long awaited follow-up to his 1988 documentary Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, director Mark Lewis returns to give the much-reviled pest another chance to defend itself. Starting off with a brief history of how cane toads were introduced to Australia for no sensible reason – they were meant to eat a bug that attacked the tops of sugarcane and cane toads aren’t known for their climbing abilities – Lewis quickly gets to the real focus of his film: the effect cane toads have had on the people of northern Australia.

The environmental impact of cane toads is a serious matter. A travelling sideshow made up of dioramas using stuffed cane toads that are, amongst other things, playing AFL football, is not. And it’s a line this skilfully made and often very funny documentary walks with ease, even when telling the story of a man actually killed by a cane toad (not directly – he was electrocuted trying to spear one). Pets lick cane toads to get high, which is funny; a dog ate a toad and nearly died, which is somewhat less funny. But even there it’s the characters of the owners – the hen-pecked husband and the wife who loved her bossy dog – that add just that little bit extra to the story.

The 3D is never a cheap trick here. Instead, it’s used to bring viewers into the film – and the ground-level world of the slow-moving yet relentless cane toad. Lewis takes an episodic approach to the cane toad’s impact, using everything from maps and historical re-creations to talking heads and pets-eye views, but the film never feels disjointed thanks to Lewis’ clear point-of-view – one that’s more on the cane toads side than you might expect. We brought them here, he argues, so we need to figure out a way to deal with them. And if that involves wacking them with a golf club or running them over with a lawn mower, go for it!

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in The Big Issue #383)

Xavier Dolan's Heartbeats & I Killed My Mother

Is there anything as annoying to a teenage boy as the sound of his mother eating? Or the sight of her messily scoffing a cream bun, with a gob of jam at the corner of her lipsticked mouth? This is the immediately recognisable scenario at the start of Xavier Dolan’s feature debut, I Killed My Mother. Dolan was a 17-year-old former child actor, living in the Montreal suburbs, and struggling to make the leap into adult roles. So he wrote and directed one for himself, appearing as the spoilt gay teenager, Hubert, fighting against his exasperated, and admittedly very annoying mother (played by Anne Dorval). The film received three awards and a standing ovation at Cannes in 2009.

Last year, the prodigiously talented and, it’s got to be said, quite stunningly handsome, 21-year-old Dolan followed up his debut with another wonderful film, Heartbeats – which won the $60,000 Sydney Film Prize (2010). Heartbeats proves again that the young French-Canadian actor/filmmaker has a gift for rendering familiar emotions with panache and humour – this time it’s unrequited love and jealousy as two friends fight for the affections of a third. Dolan is shamelessly ‘arty’ yet always accessible and never pretentious. A simple narrative wends its way through colour, music, straight-to-camera monologues and gorgeous clothes (Dolan also takes on the costume design and editing himself). I can’t wait to see what he does next.

Heartbeats and I Killed My Mother will screen together at Melbourne’s ACMI 7 – 28 April. Heartbeats will screen at Sydney’s Dendy Newtown from 31 March. Both films will release on DVD in August.

Note: This column originally appeared in The Big Issue, #377.

Rochelle Siemienowicz

The Girl Can't Help It: Sucker Punch

The only chicken nugget in the puddle of cinematic gravy that is Sucker Punch is that it’s kinda sorta aware of what it’s doing. Of course, knowing that you’re making a film built entirely around putting woman in sexy outfits then having them act out adolescent boys' panel van art fantasies doesn’t exactly make it right, but viewed in a certain light it is sort of a step forward. After all, when the first Tomb Raider movie was made to be just as vacuous and pointlessly “sexy” as Sucker Punch, Hollywood claimed that it was merely “post-content” and therefore the future of cinema. Considering it’s now the future and we have Sucker Punch, perhaps they were right.

So, to get it out of the way: the story makes no sense. Well, it makes sense in a “Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is put in an insane asylum by her lecherous father after she accidentally kills her little sister (uh, what?), then tries to escape only to spend most of the movie re-imagining her escape attempts as a lurid fantasy where her captivity is represented by a strip club / brothel and her longing for freedom is symbolised by over-the-top fantasy action sequences.” Which makes it sound a lot more interesting than it actually is - that is to say, it makes it sound interesting.

For starters, who thinks like this? Well, writer director Zac Snyder (300, Watchmen) for one. So why not simply make a film where he’s the star dreaming up all this wacky stuff while being bored during Hollywood business meetings? The fantasy sequences are so out there and over the top they tell us nothing at all about the character of Baby Doll, let alone why we should give a crap about anything that happens to her – apart from the fact she’s kind of hot if you like pouty lips and vacant expressions.

But that’s the point; if Baby Doll had a character – if we knew anything at all about what kind of person she was apart from she doesn't like being lobotomies and thinking sexy dancing is a good way to get men's attention – then the fantasy sequences couldn’t just be enjoyed as spectacle. We’d be reading them looking for insights into why she was thinking about, say, a B-25 bomber fighting a dragon and a bunch of orcs, and that’d get in the way of thinking “Coooool”. Which is all the response this film is looking for from a viewer.

[if you’re unsure of why this film is sexist when it clearly shows a bunch of “empowered" women kicking ass while all the men are fat sweaty creeps, that’s why: without any characterisation to back it up, everyone in this film is just an image to be gazed at. And when the images of women are so PG-13 / Maxim Magazine “sexy”, this becomes nothing more than a wank fantasy, a caricature of female empowerment without the danger to the male viewer of any actual females being empowered. Basically, their bodies are all these women have to offer us: if Snyder didn’t want to be sexist, he should have spent some time lingering longingly over their minds]

Not that there was ever going to be much room for character development here, what with the sexy dancing and pop culture references crowding everything else out. Knowing that the whole “I’m escaping in my mind” plot is lifted from Brazil (along with the giant samurai who bleeds light) or that the two main villains are basically Boris and Natasha from Rocky & Bullwinkle doesn't add anything more to the film than does Scott Glenn’s inane “advice” as the fantasy all-girl kill-team’s supremo (though if he reminds you of Bill from Kill Bill, consider that another reference spotted). The references are here because they're cool, not because they say anything about anybody inside the film; they're merely another way this film works entirely as surface, finely crafted fantasy art that means less than a half-decent Iron Maiden album cover (my pick: Powerslave).

Without character though, every argument this film could try to make about being empowering falls in a heap. Yes, there aren’t a lot of obvious T&A shots in the film, but considering what it’s actually about that feels more like a cop-out than anything else: these women are in sexy outfits because they’ve been objectified by the male gaze, yet the male gaze doesn’t want to stare at their backsides? The metaphor for Baby Doll's sexy dance numbers and their impact on men is bizarre action sequences? Sorry, but when I see something supposedly jaw-droppingly sexy I don't think of gunning down a bunch of robots on a speeding train and I doubt many men do - and arguing that it's Baby Doll's metaphor for what she's doing might work if Baby Doll had any character to construct metaphor with. The film builds to a sexy dance, then cuts to an action scene: well, it certainly works as a symbol of how Hollywood works these days.

Occasionally there are glimpses of a more interesting film here. Baby Doll’s fantasies seem to almost slightly trace America’s involvement in global conflict – steampunk trench warfare for World War I, fantasy creatures versus a World War 2 bomber, a Vietnam-era helicopter versus killer robots on a futuristic train – but it’s so muddled there’s nothing else to be drawn from that. Setting it in the 50s seems to have been done solely for the opportunity to highlight the casual nature of devastating brain surgery performed back then, but as Baby Doll's fantasies are so unrooted in time (guns from her future! Don't they look cool?) the film's “real world” time period, like so much else here, is merely surface dressing to attempt to justify whatever the hell it is Snyder wants to throw up on screen at any given moment. The 1950s had cool cars and a Gothic atmosphere, so the 50s it is, even if it means Baby Doll's fantasy life is packed with elements that make no sense except that they're, you guessed it, "cool".

Once you get past the cool elements - which is remarkably easy to do, because they mean nothing (unless you actually believe that, say, cutting open a baby dragon's throat to obtain crystals to cause fire is an insightful metaphor for trying to steal someone's pocket lighter while they're hypnotised by a strip-tease, in which case I have a bridge you might like to purchase) and exist solely to make you think they're cool - all that’s left is a film that for the most part does what it sets out to do, but constantly tries to sneak in apologies for it. As is often the case, this would work better if it was more sleazy and unpleasant – and yet, even with the rumours of deleted scenes and heavy edits, it sounds like all we lost there (a sex scene between Browning and Jon Hamm) was more of the same. Giving strippers guns empowers them, huh? Not unless they get to shoot the audience gawping at them it doesn't.

It’s a gutless, arse-covering approach that means this ends up being a good time for no-one: relentlessly sexist but prudishly unwilling to have any fun with it, cravenly apologetic about the clumsy sleaze it desperately wants to revel in. The tag-line is "You Will Be Unprepared", but that's an abject lie: anyone who's seen an action movie in the last decade is fully prepared for yet another incoherent film packed with ball-busting hot chicks who dress to impress and shoot to kill without ever hitting a target that matters once the lights come up. At least they got the name right: it might make no sense as far as the film goes ("sucker punch" means "surprise blow"; nothing in this story comes as any kind of surprise, even to the characters themselves), but with Sucker right there in the title you can't say you weren't warned.

Missing the Point Entirely: Never Let Me Go

The obvious thing to say about the science in the science-fiction film Never Let Me Go is this: it’s a metaphor. In fact, it is so obviously a metaphor that to try to engage with the science any further is a clear waste of time. And yet, and yet....

Yes, the (slight) science-fiction angle is used to sharpen the tale of young people for whom death comes too soon, who cling to relationships not out of love but of fear of being alone, who try to make things right in their lives only to discover that it’s too late, they’ve run out of time and the future they though they could reach thanks to the goodness in their hearts – well, society has in mind an entirely different use for their hearts. But that doesn’t mean the science doesn’t have to make some kind of sense.

The story itself is about Cathy (Carey Mulligan once she grows up) attending a strange and closed-off English boarding school in (a parallel world version of) the 1970s. Turns out it’s closed-off for a reason; advances in science reaching back as far as 1952 (so presumably it was a spin-off from Nazi science, and we all know how that operated) means that the average life-span of a human being in now over 100 years. But to live that long, they need regular “donations” – organs taken from clones, who rarely survive past the third or fourth ‘donation”. Cathy and her friends are clones, and an early death is all they have to look forward to.

Most of the film is taken up with their relationships (Cathy falls for a boy who is snatched away by her best friend; it’s not until the pair are broken by their donations while Cathy is a temporarily exempt ‘carer’ that she gets a second chance) and with exploring the unsettling but believable passivity with which they accept their fate.

Again, taken purely as a metaphor to heighten the poignancy of their plight (they don’t have long to live before they’re killed by a society that sees them as less than human), the science does its job. But this isn’t a fantasy film: it goes out of its way to create a realistic version of the rural England of the 70s and 80s, without a hovercar or lazer gun in sight.

So with that in mind, how does this life-saving medical breakthrough work? The clones aren’t clones of the people they’re donating to – the film makes clear that they’re “modelled” on the dregs of society, who’re hardly the ones at the head of the queue for life-saving medical procedures. So it’s not some kind of organ donation scheme as we know it - and how would trading individual organs prolong life in every single possible case, especially when they’re organs the donors seem to be able to do without?

More importantly, where are all the other clones? Even if each donor gives up four organs, and one new organ is all one regular person needs, you still need millions upon millions of donors. The school Cathy attends is identified as being special, the equivalent of a free-range farm, but still: you’d expect to see an awful lot of giant concrete towers in the background of the shots to store all the “battery” clones.

Okay, perhaps the organs are taken out and turned into a magic life-giving paste so you don’t really need that many clones. But if they don’t need that many clones, that’d make them kinda rare. Wouldn’t you keep them under lock and key? And the donors are able to wander around the countryside, doing pretty much what they want (though we are told later generations are kept like battery hens) – after such an investment, wouldn’t those responsible want to safeguard their investment? What if they get sick?

All of this is clearly not what the film wants you to pay attention to. But it’s a little like a magic trick: once you know how it’s done, you can’t go back to only seeing what you're supposed to. Knowing that the world in the background of this (generally effective) story doesn’t really work means the story itself loses a lot of its power. The locations become cheap sets, the emotions merely scripted words, and the heart-wrenching drama of people trapped in lives that end too soon… well, they were never really alive in the first place, were they?

Anthony Morris