So glad I caught this in cinemas. There’s no way it would play at home the way it does on a giant screen.
I showed up with an idea of what to expect. I wasn’t going to get up and pee or look at my watch. I wanted to meet this one halfway.
I’m glad I did. For 100 straight minutes I stared at an abstraction of swirling grain. Sometimes there really were things hidden in that grain, but by the homestretch, I was seeing all kinds of weird **** in all that noise and I legitimately did not know what was there and what I was imagining. You stare at something like that long enough and your brain tries to make sense of it. Add on top of that an oppressive sense of dread. When the lights finally came up, my eyes were swimming with streamers and after images. It took a few moments to adjust. There’s no way this particular effect can be replicated at home.
it’s also uncommonly effective. Legitimately scary, but more than that. There’s a sadness to it, a hopelessness. The repetitive and slow nature of the film unmoors you from your sense of time. I had no idea if it had been 30 minutes or 70, which makes it feel endless and inescapable.
This is the closest I’ve seen a movie come to capturing what a night terror actually feels like.