by Dai » Sat May 20, 2017 11:45 am
I'm so glad one of my big local cinemas screened this. I thought it was going to be a nightmare to track down.
What a great movie, and like Shin Godzilla it managed to squeeze a lot out of a $15 million budget. I'm warming more to Anne Hathaway each time I see her in a new movie; she just brings so much to her performance in this. I also liked how smart the script and editing were. It did a good job of conveying the disorienting feeling of forgetting the night before without making the story structurally confusing, which isn't easy. Unlike a typical big studio movie, it also didn't treat the viewers like idiots, and trusted us to connect the dots to things that happened earlier without needing flashbacks (particularly when Gloria was starting to realise that the monster was mimicking her movements). Even just clever little things that told us so much about the characters, like the way Gloria forgot that Oscar's mother died, but she remembers the layout of his father's bar in detail.
I found it satisfying from start to finish. It's interesting to go back a couple of pages and see people expecting this to be a romantic comedy. It's a black comedy to be sure, but romance isn't a big factor. Relationships are more important to the story--messy, manipulative, convincing relationships between friends and lovers--but the most important relationship is between people and alcohol. It's Gloria's changing relationship with alcohol that drives her progress through the story, and that's why the movie leaves its borderline red herring plot threads seemingly unresolved and ends where it does.