Review of Colonia (2016) by Ben L — 02 May 2017

Colonia is a movie that fakes you out, because you think you?re watching a particular kind of movie in the beginning. All the opening scenes are about Emma Watson and Daniel Bruhl working with political activists in Chile. It sets you up to think this is going to be a movie about them on the run from the secret police as Pinochet takes over, but then it takes a complete 180, and suddenly you realize this is a movie all about escaping a cult. It?s not a bad direction to take the story and apparently it was tied into a true story about an infamous cult, Colonia Dignidad.

There are moments in the beginning that at least frame how awful life can be in this cult, but I felt like they lacked some of the narrative setup in order to help us understand how this cult works and what they believe. Michael Nyquist was evil enough as the leader of the cult, and Richenda Carey was chilling as his right-hand woman. It was strange because I hated the place they were in, and the people who ran that place, but I still kept feeling like the world wasn?t established enough for me to worry about the main characters.

Emma Watson was fine as the heroine of the movie. She has enough talent to help us see the worry and concern on her face, but also sense that underneath she is trying to figure things out. Daniel Bruhl was not bad as her boyfriend. He has to do some interesting things with his character that I don?t think worked all the time. It?s not really a spoiler because it comes early...he pretends to be mentally challenged. It treads the line of inappropriate mockery, but it?s a logical plot device for the story and that might be what really happened. However, whatever reason they had doesn?t mean it sat well with me.

The way the events of Colonia play out is fairly standard stuff. I kept sensing that everything was familiar. There were no surprises once I realized the type of movie I was watching, and I expected it all to end exactly as it did. This similarity to stories that have come before took away a lot of the tension in certain scenes. I had a strange sense, as if something was missing the entire time I watched this movie. It?s not deeply flawed, it has a logical narrative, it has good actors, and yet it felt like a TV movie more than an actual film.