Psychological thriller or a treatise on the environment? It's a mixture of both, and it works quite well on both levels. Worth a watch, although be warned, the real life footage used in the film is quite upsetting.
School's Out / L'heure de la sortie is a flick tease.
It comes up to you in a dark cinema, looking very seductive and mysterious while it insinuates its way into your imagination. But soon after it says all the right things, red flags start popping up because it doesn't come through on any of them. It just keeps talking in circles, repeating the same things without going anywhere, only making incessant promises that become more dubious as they become more numerous.
Then, in the end, it doesn't fulfill any of its promises or answer any of the questions it posed, it simply makes a bizarre joke that's not even funny and when the lights come up you're almost ashamed to have liked it at the beginning.
Oh well, at least Laurent Lafitte is like climate change: getting hotter and hotter.
Review by Stephen CampbellBlockedParent2022-10-15T01:21:06Z
Too ambiguous for its own good
Based on Christophe Dufossé's 2002 novel, L'Heure de la sortie [lit. trans. The Time to Exit] had its world premiere at the 2018 Venice Film Festival where it screened in the new "Sconfini" section, a non-competition category for difficult-to-classify films. Which should tell you a great deal. If you can imagine the ecological themes of films such as Jeff Nichols's Take Shelter (2011) or Paul Schrader's First Reformed (2017), filtered through the milieu of Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society (1989), but with the tonal qualities of Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned (1960) or Fritz Kiersch's Children of the Corn (1984), then you'd be some way towards nailing director and co-writer Sébastien Marnier's second feature. Is it a satire about liberal Generation Z snowflakes overdramatically reading apocalyptic omens into trivial matters? Is it an allegory about how difficult it can be for gifted children to fit into so-called normal society? Is it a metaphor for the generation gap, and how today's children can often be alienated from even relatively young adults? Is it about desensitisation amongst a generation who have never known life without the internet or a world without post-9/11 paranoia? Is it a desperate call-to-arms, a plea on behalf of tomorrow's adults that humanity is rapidly reaching the point-of-no-return in terms of the damage we are doing to the Earth? Is it a horror movie about creepy kids doing creepy things? Is it all of these?
For my complete review, please visit: https://boxd.it/yW0FZ