Full disclosure. After a discombobulation of That Month and complete abandoning of the blog (not hiatus; i just ran away) I am going to try and find my way again by finishing off these posts. And then we will see where I go from there.
This movie is a period piece where a drug addict goes to an island controlled by a cult in order to free his beloved sister, the only person who cares for him. Michael Sheen leads this religious group, which we find out pretty quickly, are a bunch of thugs escaping prosecution, and surviving by seeking hostage payments from the parents of illustrious members. But there is something else going on, something about who the cult worships alongside their pseudo-Christianity god.
I kept on seeing hints of the movie I wanted to see here. It looked great, as the cult had been active long enough to have a town filled with a good number of familiar supporting British cast. And the whole dichotomy of Old Testament Religion meets Elder Gods was curious and grand. Tension is high, with Stevens doing his best bent-out-of-shape addict who may get caught by the islanders at any moment. And once we head into the explanations, it becomes visually stunning but full of "huh? what is that about?" moments.
This reveals why I may not really like this guy as a director. He gives me wonderful pieces, that if you see them as clips, or as right now, as snippets of memory, they seem quite wonderful on their own. But as a whole, as a contiguous entity, they don't pull together. His fight scenes in The Raid looked incredible, but after a while became rote. The monster at the core of the island is spectacular in its depiction, but is not fully thought through and not fulfilling by the time the credits roll.
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