Bella goes through a staggering range of transformations and fortunes, even though she is a porn star at the beginning and a porn star up to the end.
What does her mom tell her? "There are bad people everywhere; you just need to learn to handle them." LOL a disembodied voice on the phone, like one of Shakespeare's ghosts. Well, Bella handles them. Not stacking bodies like Macbeth, but the psychic cost seems to be nearly as high.
The opening scene is a real puzzler - for me, at least. I remember that she is wearing that coat of many colors that she had in Las Vegas, so it's near the end of the linear timeline.
I will say that some of this is hard to watch. But I suppose the extremity of the horror makes Bella's journey that much more epic. I would recommend against watching if you are at all sensitive to emotional-physical-sexual abusiveness or disgusting body stuff.
It just occurred to me that Bella doesn't necessarily step out of her royal ascendancy into oblivion/annihilation. When Ava tells her, "(sorry) for what?" apparently sincerely, it could be the case that Bella, shrewd strategist that she is, can see what she will become if she continues to be inured to the horrors of the career, and so she just checks out and does something better with her life.
And her one friend (that she loses - there's the tragedy)... her one friend explicitly tells her she should be doing something better with her life. She probably did.
I'm still on Bella's side at the end. She becomes a monster, yet the moment she sees herself reflected in the dead eyes of Eva, she instantly exits. The ending is especially good. It cuts the thread in just the right place.
Maybe I should give one more star for this movie. IDK. Maybe I will if I'm still thinking about it and rewatching it in five years. Anyway, it's for sure worth a watch, especially for a club/group discussion.
What does her mom tell her? "There are bad people everywhere; you just need to learn to handle them." LOL a disembodied voice on the phone, like one of Shakespeare's ghosts. Well, Bella handles them. Not stacking bodies like Macbeth, but the psychic cost seems to be nearly as high.
The opening scene is a real puzzler - for me, at least. I remember that she is wearing that coat of many colors that she had in Las Vegas, so it's near the end of the linear timeline.
I will say that some of this is hard to watch. But I suppose the extremity of the horror makes Bella's journey that much more epic. I would recommend against watching if you are at all sensitive to emotional-physical-sexual abusiveness or disgusting body stuff.
It just occurred to me that Bella doesn't necessarily step out of her royal ascendancy into oblivion/annihilation. When Ava tells her, "(sorry) for what?" apparently sincerely, it could be the case that Bella, shrewd strategist that she is, can see what she will become if she continues to be inured to the horrors of the career, and so she just checks out and does something better with her life.
And her one friend (that she loses - there's the tragedy)... her one friend explicitly tells her she should be doing something better with her life. She probably did.
I'm still on Bella's side at the end. She becomes a monster, yet the moment she sees herself reflected in the dead eyes of Eva, she instantly exits. The ending is especially good. It cuts the thread in just the right place.
Maybe I should give one more star for this movie. IDK. Maybe I will if I'm still thinking about it and rewatching it in five years. Anyway, it's for sure worth a watch, especially for a club/group discussion.