I know an epilepsy warning is a weird way to start off a video but this movie has a
lot of flashing lights so I wanted to play it safe.
Plus I had a friend in high school who faked epilepsy for attention so I consider myself
a heroic ally of the epileptic community.
With that out of the way, the goal of this video is to give you enough information to
get a feel of what the movie is like without spoiling any surprises, but I will be discussing
the basic story and things from the beginning of the film.
The plot of the movie is that assassins can possess people to carry out contracts.
The main assassination targets are Sean Bean, cause he’s never died in a film before,
and his daughter Aava.
To accomplish this, our main character is taking over Aava’s husband, Colin Tate,
to nuke both her and Ned Stark.
The first thing I love about the movie is that I was fully immersed the entire time.
Every line fits, there’s just enough scientific jargon to make the concept believable,
and almost every scene is incredibly tense.
There’s the psychological tension of the protagonist as she tries to retain her sense
of self while murdering people.
The natural tension that comes from trying to convince those very same people that nothing
is wrong. And there’s her handler who appears to be
lying her but she might just be losing it.
I feel like the movie leaves it up to you to decide and that level of ambiguity is great.
I love that I interpreted certain scenes a certain way, and was pretty sure I was correct,
then looked into it and saw some wildly different interpretations that still made sense.
As far as the directing, the movie was made by Brandon Cronenberg, son of David Cronenberg
whose somewhat famous but not quite a household name.
If I had to compare the aesthetic of it to another director the attention to detail,
detached feel, and shameless violence reminded me of Nicolas Winding Refn, the director
of Drive and the Neon Demon, as well as some other stuff I haven’t seen.
My favorite influencer, Chris Stuckmann did like a 15 hour breakdown of his movie Only God Forgives if you want
to check that out.
I think my 2nd favorite thing about the movie is how visceral it is.
It feels like you’re headshotting someone in Gears
of War or parrying someone in dark souls.
It’s also a very sexual movie and they really go for broke with those scenes.
Of course, for the majority of the movie she is a wo-man in a man’s body so there’s
some gender bending stuff going on.
And If you’re a coward that doesn’t want to randomly see erect penises on women in
your horror movies, you can always watch the edited version.
While we’re on the topic, the film also made me think about the future of and ponder
if there will come a day where you can pay a reasonable amount of money.
to have a simulated but realistic sexual experience with a hot guy or emotional support from a
nurturing woman.
But we’ll probably all die from Covid before we can get to that point.
Apparently they have a vaccine now, and it crossed my mind how fucked up it would be
If you were on a ventilator dying from it.
And as you were about to pass the news came on to announce the vaccine was available.
Sorry if that’s an outdated bit for you, but Corona numbers are still going up for us somehow.
Moving on from my impending retard flu, another thing that adds to the visceralness is the
score.
It’s not necessarily something I would listen to on its own, but it definitely fits the
movie, and ratchets up the tension when it needs to.
The third thing I like is the effort that clearly went into making this.
There’s sometimes beautiful, sometimes completely unnerving cinematography.
The pacing feels perfect.
And the casting is also top notch with Sean Bean playing a complete douchebag.
Before we get into negatives I’d like to make some more comparisons to give you a better
idea of what it’s like. it reminds me of True Detective, with the
pacing and hallucations.
It makes me think of Evangelion with it’s psychological struggle.
And it made me remember a script that Christopher Nolan wrote but never filmed called “The
keys to the street” with the movie feeling very dirty.
My main complaint about the film is that I wished we had gotten more time with the protagonist’s
family cause I didn’t care about them at all.
I also wish we had gotten more from Colin Tate, the guy she takes over.
His life is literally being stolen from him so I think if he got more character development
it would push this film from being my favorite horror movie to maybe being one of my favorite
movie movies.
But to nitpick my own nitpicks, the pace of the movie as it is feels great, and I’m
worried that if we spent more time with him or the family the movie might drag.
It’s also very easy to say “I wish these characters had more development” but now
that I’ve been writing my own script.
I’ve kind of experienced just how difficult it can be to balance everything out between
story, character, and world building. I am happy that I got it down to like 84 pages though.
Anyway, If you’ve decided to watch the movie, you can get it through video on demand or download
it for free other places.
I’d also like to throw out some other recommendations you can watch on Netflix, the promised
neverland which I’d give a 9.
Just finished Season 3 of Better Call Saul, give it a 10.
You, give both seasons a 9.
Then the Netflix adaptation of Fedmyster’s life story, Lovesong, give it an 8.
That's it for the spoiler-free section, but I do have some things that are very spoilery
that I’d like to discuss, so if you haven’t seen the movie, I will catch you on the next
one.
If you have, I’m gonna play an unrelated clip and we will get into spoilers.
So, the first thing I want to discuss is the handler.
She says this:
But later in the movie she enters the machine and takes over the protagonist’s kid.
So, is she lying to the protagonist to manipulate her into taking her place or she can take
the machine, but only for a short time?
Since she uses the word “increasingly” that sort of implies it’s getting harder
but not completely impossible. So I think the character prolly is an asshole but she's not lying about that particular thing, or atleast, there isn't strong evidence that she is.
In this scene, where Sean Bean gets out of the hospital he’s approached by our "hero".
A few people online were saying this was literal and she was going back to finish the job some
time later, since Sean looks a bit healed up.
However, I believe she is imagining this since we see it while she is receiving the news
that he survived.
And I love the meta casting of having Sean Bean play a part where he clearly should’ve
died, but he does not.
I saw someone on good ol’ Reddit say that they weren’t engaged with the plot in the
2nd half, but I think the twist that the guy from work was in on it keeps things fresh.
And of course, the twist that the handler was inside her son’s body was also very cool.
However, I almost think it would’ve been more powerful if it had just been her son.
And maybe we could have seen some signs that he was capable of killing someone earlier in the movie.
But I do think the handler used the situation to kill two birds with one stone, and eliminate
the one thing holding the protagonist back.
Lastly, I really like how the movie establishes her character arc with only a few lines in
the beginning, then a few lines in the end.
The imagery in the scenes where Colin and the protagonist were fighting for control are sort of basic most of the time.
But this shot of Colin literally breaking her face really stuck with me.