Review of Oslo, August 31st (2011) by Darien S — 07 Feb 2013

I can't relate to the drug addiction but I can to the isolation, depression, and seeming meaninglessness of life. I've rarely seen a character in a film I related to so much. Not necessarily in personality but his problems are ones I've had before. Where I've thought that nothing I did mattered or that every moment had no impact on what I was. Life just was. And I knew, most of the film, that the protagonist would probably go back to using. Because I've understood the need to maintain the status quot at the end of the day.

The quiet shots in this film are incredible. And it takes its time showing the world from the protagonist's perspective. It isn't just his pain. He tries to see the world around him as a place worth being a part of. But it doesn't matter, ultimately, how much the world is ready for him. His lens is skewed.

The dialogue, too, is very naturalistic. We really feel the weight of a day as the protagonist travels from place to place. Much of his struggles are discussed and we see the way he views the world through the people he observes. The film feels very lonely because the main character is lonely. He is no longer apart of the world. He left it a long time ago and never came back. His journey seems doomed to culminate in him being addicted again because he never tries otherwise. The film isn't about his struggle. There isn't as much suspense in the final scene where he shoots up as much as there is a sort of chilling calm. The audience knows that this was going to happen, but we care about this man. The course of August 30 is the countdown, not to a decision, but to an inevitability. But that doesn't mean that the character's life isn't valuable. I think that is what is important. The character is never made out to be a failure. His shooting up in the end is incredibly sad, but it doesn't mean that the protagonist's time away from drugs wasn't valuable. Or the time he spent in melancholy wasn't valuable.