This was an icky story.
The movie follows a character named Oliver who spends a summer with an extremely wealthy family. Their home is closer to a castle than a mansion. The main hook is Oliver's interest in a university classmate, Felix. All sorts of unusual behaviors are on display in this film. I was interested in watching it because I heard it described as being a "messed-up masterpiece." I ended up feeling like it wasn't really messed-up enough. Even though there are some fairly outrageous sequences, I felt like the movie was still too restrained overall. I would have like for the filmmakers to have really gone absolutely bezerk and given us some truly jaw-dropping moments in the final scenes. Now, you might say the end of the movie is pretty wild, but I felt that it was too tidy. For a movie about obsession and going to extreme lengths to get what you want, things cooled off way too much in the last act. Consider that there is a 17-year time gap between the bulk of the story and the closing moments; that is way too long of a period of inaction. The story needed to ramp things up instead of letting all the momentum just fizzle out. It was still worth a watch, but I can't help but wish they had taken things a bit further.
The movie follows a character named Oliver who spends a summer with an extremely wealthy family. Their home is closer to a castle than a mansion. The main hook is Oliver's interest in a university classmate, Felix. All sorts of unusual behaviors are on display in this film. I was interested in watching it because I heard it described as being a "messed-up masterpiece." I ended up feeling like it wasn't really messed-up enough. Even though there are some fairly outrageous sequences, I felt like the movie was still too restrained overall. I would have like for the filmmakers to have really gone absolutely bezerk and given us some truly jaw-dropping moments in the final scenes. Now, you might say the end of the movie is pretty wild, but I felt that it was too tidy. For a movie about obsession and going to extreme lengths to get what you want, things cooled off way too much in the last act. Consider that there is a 17-year time gap between the bulk of the story and the closing moments; that is way too long of a period of inaction. The story needed to ramp things up instead of letting all the momentum just fizzle out. It was still worth a watch, but I can't help but wish they had taken things a bit further.