MovieChat Forums > In Their Skin (2012) Discussion > This can only be a joke.

This can only be a joke.


I just watched and this cannot be taken seriously.

Here's what you get when they send a film school hipsterboy to make the work of a real director.
It may even reflect some aspects of our times, and their tragic consequences.

You can tell that the director here clearly saw some dogma films, some Lars Von Trier films and certainly (and probably only) Funny Games from Haneke. You have the shaky camera, the filtered photography, the dry cut typesetting in the beginning. And absolutely NO IDEA on why these resources are used for in good cinema.

I thought I'd start writing this to tell the lack of skill in directing the kids. The videogame scene could have been amazing. Give it to Gus Van Sant and you'd have a rare moment of class conflicts right there. What happens? You can read the script behind it: "boy plays videogame (acts as trying to kill the enemy in the screen not paying attention to anything else, hypnotized)".

You see, that's the good thing about European movies (the ones this idiot tried to copy): the camera pans and reveals characters in their universes, untouched. It's the magic moment. Every scene, the more trivial the better, reveals life. THAT's the use of the camera-on-the-shoulder aesthetics. Dumbass!

Then I will just highlight a few scenes. For instance, the ridiculous attempt to create one of those "exausted by tension, character spits out a nostalgic story from a time when everything was good". It results in a husband running out in the woods with a knife and a bimbo telling her son some funny-cute story of the time they were teenagers. Nobody would do that in that moment, the emotions were completely contradictory in the bad sense, and the film cannot blend the two moments -- tragic.

It gets worse with a mother shifting from the funny adolescent tale to very naturally handling a gun in the bathroom. Or telling her 9 y.o. son to go get his cellphone in his room (!).

Ther sex scene is something so incredibly pretentious and pathetic, with grandiloquent orchestra music and an "original" angle of 90 degrees. It is just so pathetically inserted, gratuitous and cheesy that made me think of stopping there.

Then the whole "villain doing big talk before execution" thing followed by other gratuitous sexual content scenes. We saw that, dude. A million times.

At this point, it was already noticeable that there was no movie there: his whole theme has already been done, in that very same manner, by better films. There was no point at all. But I did go on--

only to conclude that after an hour, the movie has just been blown away as an overt, shameless copy of Funny Games. Even kids with guns you have there.

It is even more embarrassing because this director masters technique, and he's able to execute it with reasonable skill: lighting, framing, photography, keying. But he's completely unable to attribute ANY meaning to these techniques. It's all there for EFFECT, nothing for meaning. And that, of course, ruins any movie. That is the ABSENCE of a movie. Which is like the absence of a brain in a person.

Try again.

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^ This ^

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wow... I haven't seen the movie yet, but that thats a good analysis! I knew once I wanted to see thsi film it was purely for entertainment, meaning I had a feeling it would be bad in some way

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Me? I think the OP is choking on his hipster hate. While, yes, it was obviously derivate of other films in the way that so many films are, including the trope of people in dangerous situations making the 2nd or 3rd best decision available to keep the plot together, I thought much of it was rendered with subtlety and created a lot of genuine tension.

OP, I don't know if you got that the sex scene as done in that corny way because of the impending reveal that they were being forced to do it as a show to amuse the kid.

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But there is a pointless sex scene earlier that has no relevance to the plot. That scene and the bathroom scene (where she remembers how they met) are both pointless. They don't move the story forward, they don't belong in the film. Actually now I understand what someone else said about trying to force two plots into one. We were supposed to care about them 'picking up the pieces' of their relationship, but wouldn't most of that go out the window once a life-threatening situation took over?

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But there is a pointless sex scene earlier that has no relevance to the plot.


I thought that sex scene was to show that although they were trying to make the relationship work there were fundamental problems. He says to her look at me. She says I'm sorry. In this scene it showed intimacy issues.

Contrasting that with the smiles at the end in the shrinks office shows that through the ordeal some connection had been re-established between the couple.

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Scientologists love Narnia, there's plenty of closet space.

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only to conclude that after an hour, the movie has just been blown away as an overt, shameless copy of Funny Games. Even kids with guns you have there.


Even worse: The scene when Jane was talking about her life and everything else. I kept thinking to myself "I saw that scene... in Funny Games". I even said "The kid is going to get shot now" but that didn't happen.


In fact, the (good) family had SO many chances to put several bullets in the other people's heads and did do it that I actually wanted them to die!

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[deleted]

How would you improve what was done? I'm not a film maker, no idea about it, although I did study film scoring and composition in music college but that's it. I just watch them don't make them.

Your post reveals everything that happened in great detail, how the director can use the tools etc. Just wondering what you think could have been done to put meaning into it.

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Scientologists love Narnia, there's plenty of closet space.

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