Review of The Square (2013) by Kenr — 19 Aug 2019

At the outset, this good looking project promised to be a grand comment on the foolishness, and greed that has taken over aspects of the modern art fraternity - instead, as it progressed, it sadly became precisely what it set out to parody. This is very unfortunate as it shows us the filmmaker may not have been particularly brave enough to deliver a focused message. Cinematographer and director work well together, turning in a visually excellent movie but this is far from good enough. With a script that ultimately offers little commitment, shape or true soul – it simply becomes a series of stylish but poorly connected sequences - pretentiously shouting to the viewer “look at my savvy creativity”.

Come the half-way mark of this unnecessarily over-long, disconnected effort, it becomes painfully obvious that we, the audience, are the ones being conned. Performances are uniformly good but, as for listing several international actors as stars - this is simply dishonest marketing - call them what they are: ‘Guest Stars’. Then, we have the director/writer/co-editor indulging his fetishes by using (or is it abusing) actress Elizabeth Moss for a gratuitous sex scene that’s initiated from simplistic ‘c’ word utterances. This segment goes on to simply culminate in one (of many) plot dead-ends - tending to look rather obviously added for its sensationalistic elements, then ultimately, coming across as simply perverse. Another major sequence features a man violently ‘aping’ an Ape which goes on far too long - only to also lead to yet another dead-end (with the truly shocking end result left hanging). Many will be seduced by this low approach to ‘high-art’ (just as the awards groups seem to be) but looking at some user comments (penned by those who bought tickets and invested valuable time to see this so-called ‘parody’)...it becomes clear many observant viewers were awake to its superficial deceptions. Several mainstream critics were also honest enough to call it out for what it was. While some might rave, as many will see it as just another disappointing cop-out.