Aisling Franciosi
Amazing performance in an otherwise messy narrative. Its a star-making performance and I look forward to seeing more of her work in the future.
shareShe is excellent, as are Baykali Ganambarr and Sam Claflin. It will be interesting to see what she does next. A star-making performance, as you say.
I disagree that the narrative is messy - I found this easily one of the most powerful and gripping films of the last couple of years, beautifully shot and superbly handled by Jennifer Kent. It pulls no punches and is not an easy watch, but I was enthralled.
I agree the primary actors performances are great but I disagree about the narrative and some of the character decisions and their motivations and this falls to direction. While Jennifer Kent was able to capture amazing performances from the actors she was not able to maintain the focus of the narrative. To me their was a lot of unnecessary exposition on plot points which had already been firmly established and thus felt heavy handed and tiresome. My biggest problem was with Clare's inexplicable change of will, spirit and motivation in the moment when she confronted Hawkins in the woods. One moment she can barely contain her desire to shoot him down and have her revenge and then suddenly she runs away and wants nothing more to do with the entire enterprise. This had me shaking my head as she had already braved and endured a fight to the death in a previous scene. I have no idea why her motivation suddenly changed and she lost her courage. Several other scenes just felt like filler with no particular service to the overarching narrative. For example the dream/nightmare sequence was entirely unnecessary as were others.
shareIt's a woman's prerogative to change her mind. She decided she would just rather sing. (I do agree that that dream-scene was not helpful.)
shareThe reason she changed her motivation is because she realized that revenge gave her no satisfaction. It deepened her pain and anger and tightened their control on her mind and character when she thought it would relinquish it. Something that the "unnecessary" dream sequences were there to convey. If the shots of blood splattered on her embarrassed face didn't already. And it's funny how you contradict yourself. You say the film is too obvious with its exposition, but than complain that the plot points are too subtle. Which is it?
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