This is the earliest of the films by Nuri Bilge Ceylan we watched so far and unfortunately it’s also the roughest one. This one is set in Istanbul so it’s great to watch scenes of the city, especially in the winter. However while we can just about discern what this film is about, it’s a struggle to make out what he is trying to say and the lack of refinement makes it feel subpar in comparison with his later works.

It’s a little annoying to me how casting Jesse Eisenberg in this is playing exactly to his type as a nervous, socially awkward nerd. But then again, it works so why not? Riley Stearns is a very new director even if this isn’t his debut and there’s no doubt that he has made here a very interesting and thought-provoking work. While ostensibly a martial arts film, this is in reality a critique of the toxic masculinity that we often see in that culture. At the same time, it’s so stylized that I’m not sure that the critique hits all that close to home.

Director Jennifer Kent’s debut The Babadook was a huge success and this is her immediate follow up. The poster and some elements tease it as being another supernatural horror film but it isn’t really one even if some parts of it are horrifying to watch. It more resembles that genre of film that involves a wronged woman who subsequently attempts to enact vengeance against her aggressors. It does twist in a way that makes it more interesting but I’m not sure that it’s for the better.

This film was based on a book that was hugely successful in South Korea and was itself a major cultural phenomenon. Watching this, it’s obvious that it must have must touched a nerve among South Korean women who recognized themselves in the story of its protagonist. I think it tries to do a little too much. The range of topics that can be comfortably covered in a novel is necessarily wider than what we can accommodate in a film. Nonetheless it is a bold and timely rallying call for the country and a wonderful sign that its traditionally patriarchal society is changing.

I’d always known that this film was a huge cultural phenomenon and remember being puzzled by it as I couldn’t make head or tails of the videogame adaptation back in the day. Now that I’ve finally watched it I can understand why it’s a cult hit, as it features performances by such musical greats as Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and James Brown. But overall, it’s just too ridiculous and too long of a film for me to like it very much.