I'm only really writing this because of the astounding amount of negative reviews here. And they are all really encompassed by a thing said by the guy who has the highest rated review.
***SPOILERS***
"Nothing comes at night. If you read the positive reviews for this movie they like to pretend you should imagine what would come at night. I did not pay $13 a ticket to imagine anything."
Props to this guy for managing to so succinctly sum up everything that is wrong about the big movie business brainwashing people enough that they can't be bothered to imagine anything, enough that they need everything to be served up on a platter and it preferably being baby food and it preferably being McDonalds baby food.
This film performs quite the amazing job of tightly illustrating the corruption of one's humanity in a film. Not only that, but said corruption happening inside a family dynamic.
The mysteriousness and lack of clarification of the film serves as the fundament for building an allegory. This is not a film about an apocalypse per se, you don't get any nitty gritty details about what the virus is, where it comes from, how many it has killed, what the news had to say about it. This is a film about a family having to withstand a powerful destructive force coming from the outside, and how they are trying to protect themselves from it. This is the reason why everything is left vague, for the purpose of generalization, for the purpose of allegory, for the purpose of allowing the spectator to fill in the details themselves with their experiences. The vagueness allows for a much larger array of empathy. Should the film fall short in terms of execution, then it would indeed fall flat, and the allegory would dissipate. This film, however, is very carefully calibrated, and it is the audience that disappoints, not the movie. It disappoints through unwillingness to process information and sensations by themselves, but rather being locked into a mode in which they just expect everything to always be explained to them so as they can be entertained and not use their brains.
The film begins with the execution of the sick grandpa. The following discussion is about how the 17 year old son should not have to be exposed to such atrocities. The very first issue in the film is about protecting the son. However in the night, the son keeps having the worst nightmares, mostly about corruption in one form or another, about getting diseased. His first nightmare begins from a painting of Breugel's, then in another scene we see another painting of Breugel's, Hunters in the Snow, a painting with a rich history in cinema. Tarkovsky used it in Solaris as the peak of the sensation of humanity desired by the astronaut's clone-wife. Lars von Trier burned it in Melancholia as the humanity in that film was being consumed by disease as well. The director here uses it knowingly, no doubt, to reinforce the question of one's humanity.
The disease in the film is irrelevant. The disease can be whatever you want it to be, it's Trump. If you wanna know what comes at night, the IT, well it's Trump, OK? It's the corrosion and corruption of today's world in regards to our humanity. The family dynamic is organized in such a way that what is of utmost importance is to protect the son from the disease. From the Trump disease. From the terribleness-that- is-in-this-world disease. The vagueness of it all was not satisfactory for me either for the majority of the film. When it really clicked, however, was right at the very end, as the first time that the son shows that he has the disease is right after his father shoots the child and the mother. Then he gets a nosebleed. Then he is infected. This film is quite spectacular for having illustrated this paradox of organizing your life around protecting your son, only to have that very organizing be the thing that ultimately corrupts your son.
It is a highly potent tragic allegory. One that requires a minimum amount of thought and effort to feel. Something that is far too excessive to ask of an audience nowadays apparently. The film offers no solutions, it just offers the proposal of contemplating this paradox, one that I am sure most of us are engaged in, in one form or another in our lives as well. This is why this film is so potent, because if only you would think for a moment you would realize that this paradox of protection is universal, and it doesn't need an apocalypse to occur. It just needs one to be such virtuously illustrated.
***SPOILERS***
"Nothing comes at night. If you read the positive reviews for this movie they like to pretend you should imagine what would come at night. I did not pay $13 a ticket to imagine anything."
Props to this guy for managing to so succinctly sum up everything that is wrong about the big movie business brainwashing people enough that they can't be bothered to imagine anything, enough that they need everything to be served up on a platter and it preferably being baby food and it preferably being McDonalds baby food.
This film performs quite the amazing job of tightly illustrating the corruption of one's humanity in a film. Not only that, but said corruption happening inside a family dynamic.
The mysteriousness and lack of clarification of the film serves as the fundament for building an allegory. This is not a film about an apocalypse per se, you don't get any nitty gritty details about what the virus is, where it comes from, how many it has killed, what the news had to say about it. This is a film about a family having to withstand a powerful destructive force coming from the outside, and how they are trying to protect themselves from it. This is the reason why everything is left vague, for the purpose of generalization, for the purpose of allegory, for the purpose of allowing the spectator to fill in the details themselves with their experiences. The vagueness allows for a much larger array of empathy. Should the film fall short in terms of execution, then it would indeed fall flat, and the allegory would dissipate. This film, however, is very carefully calibrated, and it is the audience that disappoints, not the movie. It disappoints through unwillingness to process information and sensations by themselves, but rather being locked into a mode in which they just expect everything to always be explained to them so as they can be entertained and not use their brains.
The film begins with the execution of the sick grandpa. The following discussion is about how the 17 year old son should not have to be exposed to such atrocities. The very first issue in the film is about protecting the son. However in the night, the son keeps having the worst nightmares, mostly about corruption in one form or another, about getting diseased. His first nightmare begins from a painting of Breugel's, then in another scene we see another painting of Breugel's, Hunters in the Snow, a painting with a rich history in cinema. Tarkovsky used it in Solaris as the peak of the sensation of humanity desired by the astronaut's clone-wife. Lars von Trier burned it in Melancholia as the humanity in that film was being consumed by disease as well. The director here uses it knowingly, no doubt, to reinforce the question of one's humanity.
The disease in the film is irrelevant. The disease can be whatever you want it to be, it's Trump. If you wanna know what comes at night, the IT, well it's Trump, OK? It's the corrosion and corruption of today's world in regards to our humanity. The family dynamic is organized in such a way that what is of utmost importance is to protect the son from the disease. From the Trump disease. From the terribleness-that- is-in-this-world disease. The vagueness of it all was not satisfactory for me either for the majority of the film. When it really clicked, however, was right at the very end, as the first time that the son shows that he has the disease is right after his father shoots the child and the mother. Then he gets a nosebleed. Then he is infected. This film is quite spectacular for having illustrated this paradox of organizing your life around protecting your son, only to have that very organizing be the thing that ultimately corrupts your son.
It is a highly potent tragic allegory. One that requires a minimum amount of thought and effort to feel. Something that is far too excessive to ask of an audience nowadays apparently. The film offers no solutions, it just offers the proposal of contemplating this paradox, one that I am sure most of us are engaged in, in one form or another in our lives as well. This is why this film is so potent, because if only you would think for a moment you would realize that this paradox of protection is universal, and it doesn't need an apocalypse to occur. It just needs one to be such virtuously illustrated.