Review of Compulsion (2013) by Panta O — 31 Aug 2013

Compulsion is one of those films which could be anything! Success, failure or something in the middle - the result depending on the viewer, his understanding of the subtle directing and multilayered screenplay. Even with all that this movie is very easy to watch. The director Egidio Coccimiglio choose to remake the South Korean film 301/302 from 1995, and he did a good job, which is my opinion, following the solidly developed story by Floyd Byars and Cheol-su Park (the original version director). You can not miss the screaming color palette and food which will make you crave for what is on the screen... it was almost a study on domestic glamour and the decadence of exotic food preparation. The man responsible for the "eyes feast" is the legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond ("Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "Blow Out"), who knows how to impress using lighting and color, making a hypnotic movie to study, with rich hues and a welcome freshness.

It was an interesting role for Heather Graham, and she showed that she could be a very interesting cooking show hostess. Other stars did their best as well: Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Mantegna, Kevin Dillon, James McGowan and Kate Trotter, like true professionals, did whatever the director demanded, and at the end we got a smoothly moving drama/thriller which kept us guessing even after the end of the movie.

This film interestingly explores the intimacy between the two through their connection with food, one as a passionate cook, the other as passionate consumer. But the things start changing when a next door mysterious neighbour shows up... Every character in this movie has her or his little world and we could say that various degrees of obsessive disorders are noticeable in these close worlds.

Colourful cinematography brings that "happy note" which is extremely well mixed with the following dark tones. If you are someone who loves visually stunning looking movie with surprising attention to detail and you think that you can handle a movie which has more than one possible answer for the given situation, and you love puzzles which exist in someone's own world of fantasy and fixation - maybe it's time to see Compulsion!?