What starts as a nice, but somewhat soft, attempt at smashing the horror and romance genres together turns into a complete mess once the script makes its third act reveal.
As the protagonist stumbles onto the truth at the center of the love story the film abandons any attempts at authenticity and shows a disregard for the craft of writing characters and for finding the most cinematic expression in the narrative. Instead it opts for endless, uninteresting dialogue straight out of a twee CW supernatural TV show, or worse, a Twilight film.
The filmmakers are incapable of ramping up to anything cinematically horrible, beautiful, strange, or interesting. So instead of cinema, we get multiple, lengthy, awfully written expositions of the needlessly complicated preternatural occurrence at the center of the film, even though they've visually told us almost everything we need to know early on.
And the characterization is the worst part of all of this. We are supposed to believe that the love interest is 2000 years old, but she is the least believable timeless character ever put into a genre piece. 2000 years and still all of the communication skills, gravitas and air of a annoying, immature young adult prevail. My forty six year old wife has a deeper sense of the years she's lived in her general air, than this character has in even the simplest line of dialogue or delivery. We're supposed to believe that our young male protagonist is somehow interesting enough to hold her attention, even though he's a just some cookie-cutter nice guy. She's been in and out of human relationships, presumably with some extraordinary partners, for thousands of years across hundreds of cultures, but this guy somehow has the spark? It's all bereft of the most fundamental imagination.
The direction is super competent. The photography, while a little flat when it comes to light, is compositionally strong. For the first two-thirds, the film is able to lock down an interesting tone, despite a heavy reliance on some pretty lame images of insects that are supposed to enhance the creep factor and convey nature's strange permutations, or whatever. But I can't stress this enough, the script is really bad. The dialogue can be painful, and the fact that the filmmakers don't know when to shut up and just let their story be told visually, makes for an arduous viewing on the back half of things.
I was really excited about the The Endless. The trailer looks engaging. It's interest in that film which prompted me to try this one, but The Endless has the exact same writers, and that dampens my enthusiasm tremendously. Hopefully there's been some growth between the films.
As the protagonist stumbles onto the truth at the center of the love story the film abandons any attempts at authenticity and shows a disregard for the craft of writing characters and for finding the most cinematic expression in the narrative. Instead it opts for endless, uninteresting dialogue straight out of a twee CW supernatural TV show, or worse, a Twilight film.
The filmmakers are incapable of ramping up to anything cinematically horrible, beautiful, strange, or interesting. So instead of cinema, we get multiple, lengthy, awfully written expositions of the needlessly complicated preternatural occurrence at the center of the film, even though they've visually told us almost everything we need to know early on.
And the characterization is the worst part of all of this. We are supposed to believe that the love interest is 2000 years old, but she is the least believable timeless character ever put into a genre piece. 2000 years and still all of the communication skills, gravitas and air of a annoying, immature young adult prevail. My forty six year old wife has a deeper sense of the years she's lived in her general air, than this character has in even the simplest line of dialogue or delivery. We're supposed to believe that our young male protagonist is somehow interesting enough to hold her attention, even though he's a just some cookie-cutter nice guy. She's been in and out of human relationships, presumably with some extraordinary partners, for thousands of years across hundreds of cultures, but this guy somehow has the spark? It's all bereft of the most fundamental imagination.
The direction is super competent. The photography, while a little flat when it comes to light, is compositionally strong. For the first two-thirds, the film is able to lock down an interesting tone, despite a heavy reliance on some pretty lame images of insects that are supposed to enhance the creep factor and convey nature's strange permutations, or whatever. But I can't stress this enough, the script is really bad. The dialogue can be painful, and the fact that the filmmakers don't know when to shut up and just let their story be told visually, makes for an arduous viewing on the back half of things.
I was really excited about the The Endless. The trailer looks engaging. It's interest in that film which prompted me to try this one, but The Endless has the exact same writers, and that dampens my enthusiasm tremendously. Hopefully there's been some growth between the films.