Ponderous and irritating

This film has received some excellent reviews and even won awards. Maybe it was my mood at the time, but be forewarned: this far-too-long film (130 minutes) requires a great deal of patience to reach a final payoff. For me, 'Carnage' was roughly the equivalent of watching a flick with an anvil on my chest. The so-called 'interlocking' characters (in six 'mini-stories') just didn't 'interlock' enough.

The movie is frequently tedious, slow-moving, boring, and doesn't really engage the viewer. In the brief moments that it does, we see interesting flashes of humor and encroaching tension, only to have the director (Delphine Gleize) abruptly break the momentum and maddeningly cut to the next 'interlocking' mini-story. I found this really irritating and self-defeating.

We don't have time to fully 'engage' with these characters, and we end up (inevitably it seems to me) not really caring that much about them. To me, that's a death knell for ANY movie.

The film's premise is a good one and even 'fresh' -- how a single act of barbarous human action (the death of a bull in a Spanish bullfight and its ultimate disposal in a slaughtehouse) -- results in ramifications for six different groups of people, who are either seriously and/or tragically disrupted by the event or enriched by it. But the sum of 'Carnage' and its sheer heavy-handiness just isn't worth more than two hours of trying our patience to the limit while trying to plod our way through it.

Perhaps I'll need to see it again, after I remove the anvil from my chest.