abel

It's terribly sad to see comments that are taking the "story" for what it is worth at face value and outright dismissing the movie entirely

As loathe as I am to watch "arthouse" movies, this one certainly struck quite a few chords. The journey of the young, unsure, foolhardy knight and his misplaced sense of honor and the turn he takes into fully accepting his destiny was one I enjoyed very much. The visuals and the sounds did play a large part in it, completely selling the atmosphere of a magical kingdom with swathes of unknown and unexplored mystery. The performances, too, were excellent and Dev Patel was very convincing as Sir Gawain

I'm sorry to say but the story is very, very obvious. As with these "artsy fartsy" movies, the way it is told is what elevates it and here, I feel it was justified and used to great effect. Instead of giving us the straightforward story of Sir Gawain in the ballad, something that has been told for centuries (and something I looked up afterwards because I'm not British or European at all), this movie instead attempts to recontextualise and shroud the entire thing in an air of magic and I found myself enraptured by it

It's the classic tale of a straightforward story told in a convoluted way. As King Arthur says at the very beginning, it was always just a game. What mattered was the journey Gawain took that changed him into someone who would accept what was coming because of his honor. The fox and the mansion were distractions and tried to keep him from achieving his destiny. The sash, given by his mother and returned by the witch in the mansion, was to prevent him harm but it prevented it by making him a coward. What happens after the Knight swings his axe is just the future that awaits for him for his broken oath. He removes the sash, thus letting go of all fears and the Green Knight, satisfied with the man he sees before him, lets him go. The Green Knight was never truly harmed and there was never a reason to harm Gawain either

I loved this movie. It blended the mystical and made for an enthralling journey through beautiful lands and forests and was something truly unique that I appreciate and left me wanting more

One of the sweetest movies ever made. This adaptation is just so precious. Macfadyen IS Darcy; and the soundtrack is so incredibly beautiful, I always get teary eyed listening to it.

Keira Knightley's a complete delight onscreen, and the soundtrack, cinematography and screenplay work like a charm. A spectacular experience.

I unironically LOVE this movie. It is DEFINITELY not going to be for everyone, but dear god did it manage to hook me. As someone with anxiety, it managed to capture it just about the best I've ever seen in a movie. This isn't what's literally going on inside an anxious person's head. Instead, it feels like Ari Aster is trying to make you feel like an anxious person would. It's a visual metaphor that produces a feeling that feels the same.

Idk anyway I fucking loved it. This is proof to me that you can make a movie that's confusing as fuck but still make it entertaining.

This movie explores and portrays the horrific side of depression, loss, confusion and desperation. Following a family trying to understand their daughter while piecing their life together after just loosing her. the way in which I read this movie is that Alice killed herself, after hiding her depression from the ones closest to her, and in the end even hiding it from the world (at lake mungo). The movie follows her family in their attempt to understand why she died, slowly piecing together the remenants of the life she kept secret from them. All the while still seeing her in the house, pushing them to look Draper. When they eventually find the last piece of evidence (the phone) which contains Alices interaction with her deepest fear and want which is to end her life. Her family are able to let go and Alice with them. The performances and b-roll where increadible. the whole movie felt very real. An amazing depiction of how ghosts are a manifestation of people’s pain. 10/10

I didn't understand 99% of it, but I watched it all until the end and didn't even realise it was three hours long.

Tomb Raider x The Descent. Laura Croft gets more than she bargained for in this tomb.

Man what did ari's mom do to him as a child. from heritatary, midsommer, beau, and this they all have that in common. fr tho what happened between him and his mom lol

For a found footage movie that wants you to believe that fashion models like to explore underground catacombs, this was pretty good.

The gates of Hell concept was eerie and there was some chilling moments with things walking around in the tunnels, although it probably happened more times than it needed to. There weren't that many jump scares, seven according to wheresthejump.com (2 major, 5 minor and it's funny there's a website that actually counts them and tells you when they occur).

This isn't too gory, but if you're squeamish it will bother you. The actors weren't as annoying as most twenty-somethings are in the Movies, and the main character (Scarlett) was actually easy to pull for.

There were a few times that the camera was placed in impossible locations to capture what it did, but it wasn't egregious. I was surprised by the way this concluded because it wasn't the usual modern Horror movie ending.

"Now... off with your head."

'The Green Knight' is a Christmas movie! Live with it or live in denial.

David Lowery is now a director to keep an extra eye on, in terms of his next project.

It's rare these days that we get these super weird adult fantasy movies that feels like 'The Princess Bride', but more...well, adult.

Everything on a technical and production level is flawless. Protection design, costumes, make-up, score, visual effects, Dev Patel's jizz, and the cinematography.

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays everyone!

[8.0/10] I love House half-ironically and half-sincerely. The ironic half is a reaction to the campy and the comically bizarre choices at the center of the film. And the sincere half is the way the film uses that same element of the bizarre, and some other outre choices, to craft a genuinely frightening and unnerving ghost story. The parts are inextricable from one another, and in some ways, give the movie its power -- the way it steadily criss-crosses the line between the ridiculous and the terrifying.

Nothing represents the dichotomy better than the death of Melody, the most musically-inclined of the young girls trapped in the titular haunted house, all named after some key characteristic. In one of the film’s more poetic deaths, she is drawn to the family piano to play a haunting melody, the same one that repeats nigh-endlessly in the film’s score, until the compulsion leads to her doom.

The musical instrument gobbles her up. And on the one hand, it’s absurd. A skeleton boogies along to her entranced playing. Colorful, jagged lines frame the screen like an old comic book exclamation as she’s being chowed down upon. The young actress overemotes her distress. Chroma keyed snippets of her person float across the screen, laughing or dancing or otherwise going wild. There’s an inherent silliness to it, that can’t help but make you chuckle, or at least cock your head, at the goofiness of it all.

And yet, while she’s still in thrall to this malevolent spirit, Melody looks down at her hands after playing and realizes her fingers have been severed and giggles in amusement in a creepy fashion. She screams when the lid slams down and amputates her hand. There’s genuine terror when the keys lift up and sink their would-be teeth onto her torso, as her legs kick like defenseless prey caught in the mouth of a predator. Her limbs writhe and flail out of the guts of the instrument, crying for help in a cacophony of screams and discordant notes. It is downright disturbing, to see someone dismembered and mentally scrambled by this ghastly present.

The two parts of the sequence are inseparable. There’s no “just watching the goofy parts” or “just watching the scary parts”. The ridiculous turns into the terrifying and back into the ridiculous again, and so on and so on. It keeps the viewer on their back foot, never sure whether to laugh or recoil, ultimately making them more vulnerable to the movie’s aims than if it had tried to go straight in either direction.

Granted, some of the more goofy elements don’t lend quite as much to the film’s creative purposes. God help me with the scenes featuring Mr. Togo, the teacher at the young girls’ school whom Fantasy, the film’s secondary lead, harbors a crush on. While the schoolgirls are heading off to the countryside to this house or being tortured by its spirit, Togo proceeds through a comedy of errors that end with him falling down the stairs into a bucket, eating noodles in a traffic jam with a bear, and getting turned into bananas. The physical comedy and dada-ist nonsense isn’t particularly funny, mostly inducing head-scratches in the subplot’s distraction from the main event.

Even there, though, his flailing misadventures serve the movie’s themes. The core of the ghost story centers on Gorgeous, the protagonist girl known for her beauty and vanity, and the aunt who invited the young woman and her friends to stay at her abode for the summer. The big twist is that the aunt died years ago. But she’d remained solitary and lonely for years. Her fiance’s plane went down in World War II, but she was convinced that he would return someday. And in the long fruitless wait, she eventually became this ghastly spirit, preying on young girls who represent the hope and innocence she herself once harbored. As a friend pointed out, there’s a parallel between the Auntie’s futile wait for her betrothed to come home and Fantasy’s dream of her inept “knight in shining armor” coming to save them.

Even then, the comedy of those interludes is some mix of the strange and the downright dumb, and it’s far from the film’s only rootless peculiarity. The girls spend the bulk of the film’s first act calling their friend, Mac, a fat pig despite the fact that she’s a lithe young woman who mostly seems to want to eat a watermelon? Kung Fu, the most athletic and resourceful girl, uses martial arts kicks to defeat various supernatural obstacles like a cartoon character. Gorgeous’ prospective stepmom seems to have wind blowing in her face no matter what direction she faces, with a breeze that affects no one else. There’s an outsized, almost cartoonish quality to many parts of the film.

That extends to the more formal choices as well. The direction and editing veers into downright schizophrenic at times. There are dizzyingly rapid jumps between shots, questionable superimposed images that bounce across the main focus, a frantic fruit salad of every framing and composition choice imaginable tossed together all at once, and some hard cuts that give the audience no chance to transition from one moment to the next. In other contexts, it could be taken as The Room-level amateurism given the cacophony of approaches seemingly used at the same time.

Only, it serves the ends of a horror film. While some of these creative decisions elicit chuckles or confused looks, they constantly keep the audience off-balance. They put us in the same place as the girls, experiencing something bewildering and unknowable. So when the film’s best scares come into play -- a severed head belching fluids, a poor girl trapped in a clock as the blood fills the window, Gorgeous literally and figuratively shattered by visions of her aunt and deceased mother -- the horror can still overwhelm, still grab the audience in the dream logic of this phantasmagoria.

The surrealism fuels both the horror and the humor, blending the silliness of a group of young women goofing off and taking patently spooky things in stride, with the abject panic and gruesomeness as they gradually realize their predicament and are dragged down, one-by-one, into the maw of unspent youth and unfulfilled hope this haunted house represents. House is insane, a total trip, and worth it for the absurdity alone in some places. But it’s also an effective horror film because of the way it breaks all the rules for movie-making. The absurd joys and legitimate impact of the film are one and the same, a melange of tone and styles that results in something sui generis. It is a ghost story told like none other: silly, scary, and unhinged, finding its success in those pretzel logic spaces that film can deliver like nothing else.

3 Thoughts After Watching ‘As Above, So Below’:

1. I’ll give the film cred for solid creepy and claustrophobic moments. Some scenes 100% had me squirming in my seat — as if trying to shake myself lose from tiny crevices that didn’t exist.

2. Either this movie intentionally wanted to leave a LOT up for speculation — which is totally possible — or there are simply a ton of plot holes. Who were the women chanting and what was their relevance? Who was La Taupe really? Did Scarlett become the stone in the end? If the first stone was fake, how did it heal Souxie? Who was the kid they saw down there, and the people in robes? Was this all just basically a ghost story during a trip through hell?

3. I’m a sucker for happy endings, even in horror movies, so it was nice to see them avoid the found footage trope where the film ends with a camera lying on the ground. But was it a happy ending? Were they in back home — or in hell?

Bonus Thought: Part ‘The Descent’. Part ‘Indiana Jones’. Part ‘Tomb Raider.’ This movie in a nutshell.

decent entry for this type of horror subgenre. i definitely liked descent more but this wasn't bad by any means. i will say that it does what a lot of b rate horror films do, which is fuck up the ability to suspend disbelief at relatively pointless moments. in this movie's case, i had no problem suspending my disbelief that this was a plausible scenario for the paris catacombs to throw at the protagonists, but like, how am i supposed to believe that the aramaic that george reads perfectly rhymes when translated to english?? or worse, that he's just recreating the rhyming pattern on the fly in a translation of a dead language? idk maybe he was just trying to impress scarlett, that's what i'm gonna go with.

One of the most unique horror movies I have seen in awhile. Lake Mungo is structured as if it were a crime documentary and it successfully portrays the events occurring in this film as almost undeniably true, though it does achieve this through sacrificing quite a few things you would see in a normal film. Just like all crime documentaries there isn't a big payoff and often there are more questions created than answered. This movie understands that the most terrifying things are the ones left unknown to us and uses an impressive amount of restraint to achieve a sense of unknown dread that takes a hold of you and never lets go even after the film is finished.

In short do not go into this movie expecting any type of conventional horror film. Here is a quick test for you to whether or not you'll enjoy Lake Mungo: Do you find documentaries boring? If the answer is yes than you most likely will find Lake Mungo uneventful and boring also. But if the answer is no it is most definitely worth the watch.

I didn't understand the point it was trying to make with Lennon's arc.
So, according to the delusion, if you save a missing person, you eventually become psychotic and go missing yourself, because "a body is owed". So, rangers "learned" to become apathetic towards missing person reports, in fear of getting lost themselves? Is that why Lennon left the last missing person alone? Kind of a depressing end, without any payoff, after all of her psychological traumas that were surfaced.
Is the movie supposed to be a call for help, to raise awareness on the mental issues caused by social isolation that rangers have to deal with?

Some scenes at the 1-hour mark felt like they were ripped right out of Hideo Kojima's P.T. :sweat_smile:
I think it over-relied on the hallucinations/flashbacks to show her backstory, over her acting. IMO the wrong way to do "show; don't tell".

I implore anyone going into this movie to first watch A24's recap of the Arthurian legend on their YouTube page, as well as the Wikipedia synopsis of the original poems premise. It will save you so much confusion as you wind yourself through this trippy, dream-like movie for the first time. Very much told through metaphor, symbolism and vague off comments, The Green Knight is a visually striking puzzle box of a movie that arthouse fans and A24 stans will lust over for some time (myself included). If part of the movie watching experience isn't feverishly discussing every detail with your friends and scrolling through every Reddit thread you can find, you may very well come away from the Green Knight confused and feeling like you've wasted your time. But if you're willing to open up and read interpretations from those online, as well as dive head first into Arthurian legends of old, you'll find much more here than you initially thought.
Much like Midsommar, I initially rated this fairly low, only crediting the visuals and performances for my 6/10 rating, but as I've now read up on the context and minute details, it's creeping it's way up to a 7 or 8 out of 10, but I feel it'll take a few viewings to fully lock in my impressions.