The Zone of Interest

 

Director Jonathan Glazer

Glazer receiving his prize at Cannes

Glazer with Łukasz Żal

British novelist Martin Amis

THE ZONE OF INTEREST              B                                                                                      Great Britain  USA  Poland  (105 mi)  2023  d: Jonathan Glazer

Sunbeams, radiant and warm, human bodies, young and old, and who are imprisoned here, our hearts are yet not cold.  We who are imprisoned here, are wakeful as the stars at night, souls afire, like the blazing sun, tearing, breaking through their pain, for soon we’ll see that waving flag, the flag of freedom yet to come.                                                                                           —Read aloud while the piano plays Auschwitz prisoner Joseph Wulf’s composition Sunbeams

Making films about the Holocaust is a genre in itself, producing a large sample size of films, where Claude Lanzmann’s epic SHOAH (1985) is arguably the best and most impactful, required viewing for each successive generation, yet other notable contenders are Alain Resnais’ NIGHT AND FOG (1956), Jan Nĕmec’s Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci) (1964), Louis Malle’s AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS (1987), Roman Polanski’s THE PIANIST (2002), Tim Blake Nelson’s THE GREY ZONE (2002), Malte Ludin’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Him (2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß) (2005), Cate Shortland’s Lore (2012), Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2014 Top Ten List #2 Ida (2013), Christian Petzold’s 2015 Top Ten List # 3 Phoenix (2014), and László Nemes’ Son of Saul (Saul Fia) (2015), to name a few, though Spielberg’s SCHINDLER’S LIST (1993) may be the most popular and most watched.  In his first non-English language film, this feels more like a spiritual sequel to the chilly austerity of Michael Haneke’s formally precise The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte) (2009), as the cruelty on display is overwhelming, told with a detached, observational point of view, where the privileged elite have a despicable superiority complex where they routinely order others around in a long-standing practice of servitude, taking great pleasure in causing others to suffer, motivated primarily by greed and self-interest, paying little mind to any existing humanity, viewing outsiders only for their ability to serve the master race.  Certainly one eye-opening aspect is the role German women play in the Führer’s Final Solution, where the Nazi machinery of human extermination was a murderous practice designed to remove all witnesses to the crimes of the SS, yet what they envision is a utopian world that amounts to an Aryan paradise on earth, living the dream of the Third Reich, having expanded east into Poland, claiming it’s their birthright, seeing themselves as a chosen few, an all-powerful ruling class, having the best of all things, completely indifferent to the inhumane suffering that others routinely suffer for their benefit, where a life of extreme privilege is all that matters, no matter the cost.  One of their absurdly ridiculous bourgeois concerns is having the clean linens hanging from the lines protected from the stain of a continuous stream of crematorium ash falling from the sky, like washing the blood off their hands, where no amount of cleaning can prevent the scourge of death, or ignore the foul stench of burning bodies that contaminated the entire community, as the sins of the old are quite literally infecting the next generation of the young, as even the children learn to ignore the atrocities by not looking out the window.  One striking realization is the complete absence of love in their lives, where they express love to animals, their dogs or their horses, but not to each other.  From the maker of SEXY BEAST (2000), BIRTH (2004), and Under the Skin (2013), after having gotten his start making commercials and music videos, this film won the Grand Prize (2nd Place) at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, where it received a six-minute standing ovation, a very freely inspired adaptation of the 2014 Martin Amis historical fiction novel, where the film is dedicated to him, as he died the same day the film premiered at Cannes.  Glazer’s films often involve worlds disrupted by unexpected visitors, like a psychopathic criminal colleague arriving at the door in SEXY BEAST, a ten year old boy proclaiming he is the reincarnation of the bride-to-be’s deceased husband in BIRTH, or an alien’s callous view of the human race in Under the Skin (2013), while he’s also played around with the element of empathy in fascinating and unusual ways.  This film is inhabited by the ghosts of the dead, immersed in a world of complacency, where an immense estate with gardens and flowers and even a swimming pool rests on the nightmares of the Holocaust, situated alongside a giant wall of the neighboring Auschwitz concentration camp surrounded by barbed wire, where just over the horizon there are constant sounds of arriving trains, with clouds of puffing smoke seen moving just over the rooftops, while muffled screams can be heard, and barking dogs, with angry military orders and shots fired (Oscar nominated sound design by Johnnie Burn), but only the fuming chimney smoke reveals the horrific atrocities that occur there, where an estimated 1.1 million were gassed and incinerated in the Auschwitz crematoriums, which are completely ignored by this influential Nazi family.  They’re not turning a blind eye to mass murder, they’re planning and implementing it, as the banal routines of their lives become the central focus, leaving the rest to the imagination of the viewers.  There is an intentional absence of drama in Glazer’s screenplay, as nothing much happens beyond what we know is happening offscreen, yet viewers are immersed into the ordinary rhythms of their lives, where they simply become numb to the deaths happening just outside their doorstep, yet there is no moralizing or rendered judgement here, but it’s suffocating just the same, as an unseen stench permeates every frame of this film.

The silence and closed walls of a theater make the viewing experience so much more impactful, as this is as much an auditory experience as a visual undertaking, with Glazer skirting the boundaries of what’s really happening by obscuring the routine killings of an extermination camp, keeping those horrors at a distance, and focusing instead on the normalcy of life taking place in that beautifully constructed mirage next door, with a spacious house with perfectly manicured landscaping, an idyllic place of bucolic peace and contentment, where the utter indifference on display is highly disturbing.  Much like Scorsese’s portrait of Native-American genocide in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), this film explores the horror of the Holocaust not by focusing on the millions of victims, but by singularly showing the perspective of the perpetrators.  Christian Friedel, the schoolteacher in The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte), is Rudolf Höss, the longest serving Nazi SS Auschwitz commandant who runs the camp from his nearby family residence, leading a quiet life in a luxurious villa that he leaves every morning to go to work, spending much of his time dictating reports by phone, basically married to his job, overseeing the arrival of the prisoners to their elimination, living with his Lady Macbeth wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), displaying pride and disgust in equal parts, with occasional bouts of histrionics, deemed the Queen of Auschwitz, their five children, the oldest already part of The Hitler Youth, and beloved family dog (Hüller’s own dog, a Weimaraner mix), all living in domestic bliss.  It is a ghoulish study of what Hannah Arendt described as “the banality of evil” in her 1963 exposé on Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, where her assertion is that history’s greatest evils, instead of being carried out by fanatics or sociopaths, were instead done by bureaucrats and ordinary people who accepted the heinous practices of a murderous national state as “normal,” suggesting evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.  Höss and his family go on outdoor picnics in the nearby forest, swim and fish in the streams, and entertain guests in their vast backyard gardens while tucking their kids into bed at night reading them bedtime stories, making sure all the house lights are turned off and the doors locked.  His position offers them a luxurious life, one they often dreamed of, believing this is the reward for carrying out Hitler’s Final Solution, planned in meticulous detail by Nazi officials, including Höss, who was instrumental, earning the admiration of Hitler and other Nazi leaders because of his innovative and efficient methods of murdering Jews, exuding an almost giddy pleasure in his success, where it would be impossible to entertain any idea that the family was unaware of the crimes committed in the name of the Nazi empire, as they were all complicit in achieving that heinous goal, believing it would help them reach that dream of establishing a German oasis.  At one point, a Jewish woman is brought from the camp to Höss’s office for his sexual pleasure, another aspect of the systematic dehumanization.  Hedwig fully understands her role as she sadistically oversees the daily chores of a silent cadre of terrorized camp prisoners as gardeners, housekeepers, and cooks with an iron fist, a bone-chilling display of brute power, occasionally threatening to have them sent to the other side of the wall if they don’t exactly comply with her wishes, while taking what she pleases from the stockpile of Jewish clothes, furs, jewels, and cosmetics left behind in the camp, even asking her husband for specific colors of clothing, while at the same time complaining about how Jewish women were so terribly thin.  In lockstep with the times, perhaps it’s not surprising to learn that every week she sends Hitler a bouquet of flowers from her gardens.  Edited with cold precision and punctuated with an ominous score by Mica Levi, an abstract mix of organs, synthesizers, and voices, while shot from multiple angles with fixed, remote-controlled cameras by Polish cinematographer Łukasz Żal, who was Oscar nominated for Pawel Pawlikowski’s beautifully crisp black and white 2014 Top Ten List #2 Ida and Cold War (Zimna wojna) (2018).  There’s a center-focused, Kubrickian symmetry to every shot, which is geometric in its staging, expressed with almost suffocating perfection, given an antiseptic, clinical feel, where much like Kubrick, Glazer is utterly obsessive in his approach to filmmaking, which is all-consuming, as we are immersed into the lives of a family that shows no signs of any sort of moral compass, exhibiting indifference in the face of atrocities, where the harrowing portrait of normalcy in their lives is frightfully chilling, as they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, fully invested in carrying out the Führer’s vision of a master race, where the illusory nature of power leads to such a widescale murder of millions, plunging us into the landscape of death and depravity from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.  While Glazer does humanize the Höss family, as Shakespeare does Macbeth, but in no way are they portrayed sympathetically, instead the vile nature of their horrific deeds is viewed as a deeply entrenched aspect of the human condition, where it’s not so much about examining Nazi ideology as exploring the human capacity for violence, and how much suffering we are willing to ignore, unleashing the murder of innocents on a scale we’ve never seen, at one point reaching a peak of 2000 lives per hour.    

The human mediocrity on display comprising the large majority of this film stands in stark contrast to the efficiency of mass murder happening just outside our vantage point, with Glazer, who grew up on the northern outskirts of London as part of a thriving Jewish community, showing a fascination with the benign routines of ordinary life, suggesting this was German life during the Holocaust, business as usual, no one in the least bit disturbed, but in doing so, despite the skillful portrayal, the victims are barely referenced, and in fact are avoided, a calculation that feels misguided, for instance it leaves out the Sonderkommando who were so prevalent in THE GREY ZONE and Son of Saul (Saul Fia), as victims throughout time have been largely negated and overlooked.  Whatever Glazer’s intentions, there’s a vacuous emptiness to the artful austerity of the film that undermines any real connection with viewers, who may be in awe of the film aesthetic, but they’re not emotionally invested.  The clinically detached design of the film stays one note and never evolves, described by director and screenwriter Paul Schrader as a parlour trick, feeling overly restrictive and overly reliant on a Reality TV-style immersion into the lives of vile characters that you can’t get away from fast enough, whose emotionally distant lives are filmed as if they are under constant surveillance.  Court psychologist Gustave M. Gilbert described Höss as objective and numb during the Nuremberg trials, where he was hung in 1947 just yards away from his Auschwitz family estate, the last ever public execution in Poland.  The film was actually shot in Poland, where the final credits are a stream of Polish names, with Glazer collaborating with the Auschwitz Museum and other organizations, provided access to the archives, and some of the meticulous historical detail is impressive, where he read the testimonies provided by survivors and individuals who had been employed in the Höss household, including photographs, none of which show the camp looming in the background, a sprawling complex comprised of 15 square miles, as they intentionally avoided that angle, but the film corrects that omission, as it’s an unavoidable reality.  At one point Hedwig’s mother (Imogen Kogge) arrives and is proudly shown around the grounds of the garden, given a room upstairs, where she’s haunted by the nearby sounds and the burning night sky, but no one utters a word about it, evoking a deafening silence, until eventually she leaves without a word, though she leaves a handwritten note that her daughter angrily destroys.  After a scene in which Höss reads the chillingly similar Grimm’s fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel to his children (where an ill-intentioned witch is burned alive in her own oven), the film cuts to a completely different look, a black and white thermal-photography sequence of a young girl secretly walking out into the night, resembling a dream sequence, but gradually the format shifts to standard color photography, where viewers realize she’s not only real, but an essential component of the storyline based upon Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, Aleksandra Kołodziejczyk (Julia Polaczek), a local Polish girl who was part of the underground Polish resistance (The Polish Underground Home Army (AK) and the Jews) who secretly left food and medicine for the prisoners in construction sites at night, given a surreal flourish as she’s seen leaving apples, suggesting empathy does exist even in this hellish inferno.  As it turns out, she’s wearing the same dress and bicycle that belonged to her, artifacts that are part of the Auschwitz Museum.  We also see her playing a real piece of music on the piano, a Yiddish song Sunbeams that she discovered curled up in a tin written by Auschwitz prisoner Joseph Wulf who survived the camps to become a Jewish historian, but committed suicide, writing about his frustrations in his last letter to his son, “I have published 18 books about the Third Reich, and they have had no effect.  You can document everything to death for the Germans.  Yet the mass murderers walk around free, live in their little houses, and grow flowers.”  In another dramatic turn, Höss is transferred to a different locale closer to Berlin as supervisor to all the camp commandants, but Hedwig is infuriated and refuses to move, firmly rooted in a place where she feels invested, where living a pampered existence takes precedence over his promotion, even if that means living without him.  The place that was hell on earth for those imprisoned in the camp is viewed as paradise on earth for Hedwig Höss.  In a pivotal scene where she confronts her husband, Hedwig is seen walking at a brisk pace alongside the camp walls (which have now been overgrown by giant trees), using visual effects to simulate exactly as it would have looked in 1943, where the barracks and watchtower remain exactly as they are.  In a stunning final sequence, Höss is at Party headquarters for a formal dress ball, attending alone, where in one moment he takes in the gravity of the boldly dramatic architecture design glorifying the Nazi Party, later seen alone on an empty stairway, where we see him peering down darkened corridors in a shrewdly calculated flash-forward to a present day cleaning crew on the grounds of the Auschwitz Museum, where they silently do their work, while in the background are glass enclosures with Jewish artifacts left behind, all that remains from the dead, a powerful image where the immense silence through the passage of time imposes its own will on viewers.      

Sibyl

 

Director Justine Triet

Triet with actress Virginie Efira

Efira and Triet with actress Adèle Exarchopoulos

SIBYL            B                                                                                                                           France  Belgium  (100 mi)  2019 ‘Scope  d: Justine Triet

The subjectivity of her words must seem objective to you.                                                       —Igor Maleski (Gaspard Uliel)

Justine Triet is a graduate of École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, a classical and historical School of Fine Arts that mostly graduates painters, sculptors, and architects, where she discovered video editing, having made documentaries before turning to fiction, exploring the gray areas and vagueness in our lives, using subtlety, dry wit, and sensuality. Describing her movies as “self-portraits,” according to Triet in an interview with Le Monde, “I have a crazy fear of things disappearing.  I make films to freeze a moment in the present.  Films, for me, have the possibility of organizing the chaos of our existence a little.”  Accordingly, this is a fractured puzzle piece, a carefully choreographed musical chairs of rotating pieces, where Sibyl (Virginie Efira, described as “The best Belgian actress you probably don’t know” by the Flemish newspaper De Standaard) is at the center, a one-time novelist who has turned into an apparently successful Parisian psychoanalyst, but is having second thoughts, lacking any real connection to any of her patients, still devastated by the messy break-up of an earlier relationship years ago with Gabriel (Niels Schneider), ultimately leading to the birth of her first child, also reeling from the alcohol-fueled suicide of her mother, with whom she had a distant relationship, now having the unpleasant task of informing her patients that she is leaving her practice to return to her initial passion and take up writing fiction again, which causes violent outbursts for some who are not too pleased at the news.  This state of imbalance sets the tone, as this is a subtle drama about the cruelties that people, consciously and unconsciously, inflict on themselves and others, through selfishness, manipulation, self-deceptions, and half-hearted decisions, where the film is a whirlwind, blackly comic drama growing ever more exaggerated by the second, with the supposedly even-keeled Sibyl slowly losing her sense of equilibrium, discovering writer’s block even before she writes a single word.  She’s a recovering alcoholic who lives with a graciously understanding boyfriend Étienne (Paul Hamy), two young children, and her brazenly calculating sister Édith (Laure Calamy) who endlessly complains about the difficulty of being single and her lousy career prospects, eliciting Sibyl’s sympathy, yet seems to delight in deceptively undermining her more successful sister, hilariously seen teaching Sibyl’s daughter how to trigger her mother’s feelings of guilt.  Sibyl’s own therapist, Dr. Katz (Arthur Harari, the director’s partner and cowriter), recalling the evils from the diabolical, sado-masochistic lesbian Dr. Katz from Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss (Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss) (1981), thinks she’s making a bad decision, for reasons we only discover later, continually avoiding the demons of the past, as this is a tragicomic farce that delves into the intricasies of impulsive tendencies and human manipulation, exposing sexual, drug-related, and emotional addictions.  Anything but straight forward, the film takes a circuitous route through intrusive flashbacks and oblique references told out of time, where there’s always a suspenseful level of uncertainty to what we’re witnessing, never quite sure what to make of it, but Efira offers a stellar, tour de force performance that never wavers, yet borders on the edge of hysteria.  Psychoanalysis and cinema come together, blurring fiction and reality, where this exhilarating yet often confusing drama escapes any classification.  A somewhat subversive take on the modern, bourgeois woman, the title is likely a reference to the best-selling 1973 book Sybil (Sybil Dorsett, a pseudonym for Shirley Ardell Mason) that documents a patient’s multiple personality disorders, supposedly manifesting 16 different personalities, mirroring the Triet character’s erratic behavior and the changing nature of her identity, continually evolving into something new and different as the need presents itself, while Sibyl also references a prophetess in ancient Greek legend, speaking by divine inspiration on behalf of the gods, most commonly Apollo.  Neither one is ever mentioned in the film. 

Premiering at Cannes in the main competition, having already worked together with Efira in VICTORIA (2016), where she was nominated for a Best Actress César Award in France, Triet gets into the narrative mixer right from the outset, delivering a stunning amount of exposition in the first half hour through a dizzying series of edited vignettes that may leave viewers gasping for breath, wondering what in the hell is going on.  Just as Sibyl is ridding herself of her patients, she receives a desperate phone call from an up-and-coming actress on the verge of suicide, Margot, Adèle Exarchopoulos from Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle, Chapitres 1 et 2) (2013) and Michaël R. Roskam’s Racer and the Jailbird (Le Fidèle) (2017), who tearfully begs to see her.  Sibyl resists, but ultimately gives in shortly afterwards from the sheer persistence while scenes from David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014) appear on her television set, as Margot discovers that she has become pregnant by her onscreen partner Igor (Gaspard Uliel in his final film before his tragic ski accident death), who is himself in a relationship with the German film director Mika (Sandra Hüller).  Fascinated to the point of obsession, Sibyl becomes more and more involved in Margot’s tumultuous life, with all signs pointing to an abortion, as otherwise her pregnancy could sabotage her career, with Sibyl secretly recording the young woman’s therapy sessions which she then uses as inspiration for her novel, taking salacious material directly from her emotionally distraught circumstances, living vicariously through her, raising legitimate questions about where artists actually draw their inspiration from.  There may be traces back to Gena Rowlands suffering a midlife crisis in the Woody Allen film ANOTHER WOMAN (1988), as she’s also trying to write a book, drawing inspiration from overhearing the psychiatric sessions of a pregnant woman in a neighboring apartment, becoming a stand-in for her own repressed emotions, while Sibyl also relives her own repressed tragedies.  Apparently unconcerned about artistic plagiarism, or how her novel might undermine her existing relationship with Margot, Sibyl is always viewed as the sane authority figure in the room, yet this blurring of reality is only heightened by recurring flashbacks of her love affair with Gabriel, becoming the cause of her earlier alcoholism, plunging her back into the vortex of her past, leaving behind a terrible sense of emptiness and loss.  The onscreen intimacy of Efira and Schneider is only heightened by the fact they are a couple in real life, where a central fireside scene together is erotic and brilliantly choreographed, as clothes are removed in one long sequence leading into nakedness and sex, always feeling natural and organic.  Despite reducing her caseload, Sibyl still holds onto a young boy, Daniel (Adrien Bellemare), playing board games together as a way of extracting pertinent information, but he’s clever enough to make sure she abides by rules they devised, apparently taking extreme pleasure in preventing her from asking too much at one time, thereby shielding her efforts to help him process the trauma of his mother’s death, but they have a delicate balance in their relationship that may be the healthiest and most satisfactory in the entire film.  Sibyl plunges headlong into her relationship with Margot, offering vague encouragement every step of the way, as she apparently cannot work without consulting her, developing a dependent psychological crutch that quickly goes off the rails, losing any pretense of professionalism, joining the actress on the movie set on the island of Stromboli, just off the north coast of Sicily, containing Mount Stromboli, one of the four active volcanoes in Italy, recalling Ingrid Bergman’s existential crisis in Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950) that famously sparked a scandalous affair between the actress and her chosen director.  In an absurd development, Margot refuses to speak to the lead actor Igor, demanding that he speak through Sibyl when communicating, which over-emphasizes her role on the set, with everyone quickly turning to her whenever there’s a problem, expecting she’ll provide a calming fix to escalating tensions in the air.  

Once we get on the set of the film, the chaotic, behind-the-scenes atmosphere resembles Fassbinder’s BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE (1971), a satire on the film business itself with a doomed production unit where both the cast and crew are besieged by every possible thing that can go wrong, where nerves are continually on edge.  At the center of the controversy is the unraveling relationship between Margot and Igor, the stars of the film, which sends shockwaves through the rest of the crew, having a debilitating effect on the exquisitely high-strung director Mika, especially when Igor ignores Mika’s exasperated stage directions, constantly pleading for more emotions from her actors, even as they personally despise one another.  One by one they turn to Sibyl for some sense of balance and sanity, seeking in-the-moment professional help, yet Sibyl strangely ends up taking the place of the actors when they refuse to participate, actually walking off the set in disgust.  Inevitably, Sibyl’s best intentions are sabotaged by her own deluded obsessions and unfilled desires, as they are all dysfunctional without her, becoming too close to each one of them to render any objective impartiality, where she can’t help impulsively catering to the needs of others, so there are daily meltdowns of histrionic theatrics, with a kind of screwball comedy in the dizzying dialogue that grows ever more exaggerated at every turn, elevating the tragic dimensions of the idiosyncratic characters, evidently a staple in Triet’s films, where the inappropriate emotional eruptions match the sputtering volcano seen in the background.  The insanity is fun to watch, filming on a yacht out in the open sea, as Sibyl is helpless to stop the production tailspin, actually contributing to it, where Sandra Hüller’s comic talent is effectively utilized, continually asking for what the actors can’t give, literally driving them headfirst into a wall over and over again, creating indescribable tension, yet she’s unable to see the ridiculous aspect of her unhealthy and unrealistic expectations, as her self-righteous focus is more interested in maintaining her tyrannical control over the set, turning to Sibyl, of course, to back her up, yet the crew is having none of it, so in total desperation Mika simply jumps into the sea and swims to shore, leaving Sibyl in charge of directing the final scenes.  While it’s bravura filmmaking of comedic outlandishness, each of the characters contributes to the dysfunction, always turning to Sibyl as some kind of savior for a seemingly doomed film, where her calm demeanor becomes more and more frazzled, clearly out of her element, having no experience whatsoever in this kind of artistic endeavor, yet she meticulously documents it all in writing her new novel, actually reenacting scenes each night in her room, literally immersing herself in someone else’s life, violating all professional boundaries, where ethics and art are diametrically opposing forces that merge into personal ambition.  Sibyl’s publishers are overjoyed with their first glance at this new material, describing it as a war of the sexes on a backdrop of social revenge.  Sibyl recedes back into alcoholism from all the added pressures, where drunken scenes escalate into slapstick comedy, always uncomfortable territory unless handled deftly, and Triet seems content on pushing the uncomfortable limits of the audience, with Sibyl sliding ever further out of control, unleashing a flood of emotions, as her past and present repeatedly collide, creating a more volatile personality, making a mockery out of her life and profession, and her surprising career move to transition back into being an author.  She sacrifices her soul by stealing the life of one of her patients solely for personal gain, which has an increasingly pathetic look about it, especially when an out-of-control Margot destroys a hotel room in a fit of rage, but it’s wrapped in a bow of comic sketches brilliantly stitched together designed to titillate viewers with a grotesque yet carefully choreographed theater of the absurd that grows bleaker by the minute.  While it’s a curious venture, reprehensible characters with dubious motives fill the screen, as there’s nothing in this chaotic narrative that ever draws in an audience or ties any of this together, as if the director herself lost her way in this sea of possibilities, continually leaving viewers on the outside looking in.