This is a bit of a hard one to peg. Stylistically, the tone and cinematography remind me a great deal of "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night" (2014). TEOMM features some rather arresting and carefully selected black and white framed shots while also largely avoiding the use of dialogue. Tone and visuals count more here than verbal narrative.
Yet to the extent there is a story line here, TEOMM might be compared to something like "Deranged" (1973) or McGee's "May" (2002) or "The Woman" (2011). It is a beautiful film in many respects. But it is also quite cold and dispassionate. It almost plays like a thought experiment performed on a certain character type.
The character? The striking Kika Magalhaes plays the principal character "Francesca," who is depicted as being at once deeply lonely, indifferent to the pain of others and rather conscious of the moral qualities to her predicament. Francesca is a free floating atom that never quite bonds in the proper way with the other humans she comes into contact with. Yet we do not know enough about her background to, say, blame her issues on "mom" ("Psycho," "Deranged") or her own victimhood ("Closure").
So, in the end, I have trouble pinning down what the "point" of this film is. It is not a slasher flick in any conventional sense of that word. Magalhaes appears to have been selected for her physical beauty and apparent delicacy, while also conveying the determined acts of a calculating "survivor." Yet TEOMM really is not a character study or a social commentary on survivorship. We only get glimpses of what makes Francesca tick, and there certainly is no cathartic victory over circumstances. In the end, I recommend this one just because it is so engaging and beautifully filmed.
Yet to the extent there is a story line here, TEOMM might be compared to something like "Deranged" (1973) or McGee's "May" (2002) or "The Woman" (2011). It is a beautiful film in many respects. But it is also quite cold and dispassionate. It almost plays like a thought experiment performed on a certain character type.
The character? The striking Kika Magalhaes plays the principal character "Francesca," who is depicted as being at once deeply lonely, indifferent to the pain of others and rather conscious of the moral qualities to her predicament. Francesca is a free floating atom that never quite bonds in the proper way with the other humans she comes into contact with. Yet we do not know enough about her background to, say, blame her issues on "mom" ("Psycho," "Deranged") or her own victimhood ("Closure").
So, in the end, I have trouble pinning down what the "point" of this film is. It is not a slasher flick in any conventional sense of that word. Magalhaes appears to have been selected for her physical beauty and apparent delicacy, while also conveying the determined acts of a calculating "survivor." Yet TEOMM really is not a character study or a social commentary on survivorship. We only get glimpses of what makes Francesca tick, and there certainly is no cathartic victory over circumstances. In the end, I recommend this one just because it is so engaging and beautifully filmed.