Review of Lunacy (2005) by Jordan S — 22 Aug 2007

I enjoyed it rather a lot for the first half hour or so. Even the 5.1 mixing was surreal, with the back speakers often used to project unrelated environmental sounds; meanwhile the anachronistic and non-sequential nature of the visuals seemed so simple, I couldn't believe I hadn't seen this done before - thinking about it now, I probably have, but I hadn't seen it done so well, so seamlessly before - so seamlessly that it took most of the length for me realise exactly what was so strange about the way the Marquis de Sade ate his bananas.

But even this failed to sustain itself; there was a very shiny and un-Svankmajer-ish torch, and after the chocolate cake and the puppet theatre there was nothing much of any visual interest - all we are left with is the story, which was never interesting or exciting.

Calming that it is merely a horror film, and not a work of art, should theoretically make it immune to criticism - but I'd suggest that Svankmajer is more suited to art than horror, as this is far more depressing than scary, and only the puppet theatre and a few other images are shocking in their inventiveness.

The most disappointing element was the ending, which had practically already happened 20 minutes ago and could be seen coming even before then.