Review of Biutiful (2010) by Romulo C — 03 Aug 2012

This film is utterly devastating and depressing, without much to lift it above its plodding pace except for emotionally evocative scenes of Javier Bardem with his children. So dark and bleak is the plot that it's like wallowing through grief, and each new development is another step into that murky, suffocating tragedy.

Though it seems to search for beauty in the horrors, they are fleeting glimpses of innocence that is threatened by the consequences the audience knows is coming from early on in the film. That inevitability only makes the mood more morose and morbid.

It isn't that the movie isn't worth seeing; the question is whether one wants to subject oneself to the emotional masochism that awaits.