MovieChat Forums > Endorphine (2016) Discussion > Sadly I need an explanation of this one ...

Sadly I need an explanation of this one :(

posted 9 years ago by nizzy79
4 replies | jump to latest

I don't want to not like it, but it's really hard to like something that just doesn't seem to make any sense.

The whole time bending thing was mentioned, but I didn't see how it was explained in this movie.

What was up with the finger, blackhole in the hand, why she was pleasing herself, what did the opening scene when she took steps forward and backwards mean, not overly important in the grand scheme of things, but the cousin, the race morphing at the end, and the point of the older actor?

I saw this at tiff and was a tad annoyed I wasted a pick when I only had 5 options for a movie.

5 out of 10 for me.

[–] C_h_r_i_s_t_o_p_h_e_r 9 years ago

There is NO explanation. I gave it a 5/10 as well. It was like Inception but annoyingly repetitive. Worst film I've seen at TIFF so far for me.

[–] cdunbar-959-324822 8 years ago

Thanks for this post, I wasn't being pulled into the movie & needed some plot guidance before continuing. Decided to eject the DVD and move on.

[–] soramese 8 years ago

You posted this a while ago, but maybe I can help someone else.

The movie makes a lot of references to dreaming, specifically lucid dreaming. In our waking state, lucid dreamers perform reality checks to make sure we are in fact, still awake and not in a dream. Counting your fingers is one technique, so when her mother pulls off her finger, she's affecting the way Simone counts her fingers. She obviously is missing one so she's short of the 10 she'd expect to find normally. At the beginning of the film, when the man laying in the empty parking lot looks at his hand, he has 11 fingers, another indication that he's dreaming. That is "the sign" the woman speaks of in the opening scene. The black hole is another lucid dreaming method, but it's also shaded in a way that makes it look as if there's a hole through her hand. Stigmata maybe? Not sure about that one.

In the scene where she's touching herself, she's wearing the shirt she had on when she witnessed her mother's death, and she's laying inside of the truck that I assume the man who killed her mother drove. I'm not sure what exactly was erotic about this, but I know she was struggling with her sexuality after her mother's death (watching that video and wanting to know what it was like to lick someone's tongue, wanting to kiss her cousin, wanting to be alone with him so she can kiss him while he's unconscious).

In the opening scene, she and the world are moving at two different speeds. If she were to walk full speed the image of the bus would still look like a slide show. Sort of like what they were talking about with the fly's vision. Her walking forwards and backwards is her trying to understand how it works I guess.

When there was that shot of her face through different ages, the faces morph between pain and ecstasy. The older actor is Simone as an older woman. The same woman speaking in front of the college students.

This of course is all just my observations and interpretations. I thought this was a really beautiful film, it combines so many of the things I'm interested in.

[–] filmfancy 8 years ago

When there was that shot of her face through different ages, the faces morph between pain and ecstasy. The older actor is Simone as an older woman. The same woman speaking in front of the college students.

* POSSIBLE SPOILERS *

I didn't catch that the college lecturer was Simone as an older woman. This film had the potential to be interesting, but sadly it only proved to be quite confusing. One minute Simone is a young teenager; the next, she's in her 20s living alone and working in the same garage where her mother got killed. The meshing back and forth between past, present, and future was too convoluted; there wasn't a proper lead-up.

My take on the proceedings was that everything was happening while Simone was being hypnotized by the therapist so that she could get some closure on what happened to her mother.

It was strange at the end when her father talked to her about witnessing her "coming" while she was in a trance or sleeping. What father talks to his daughter that way!

Another weird occurrence was the scenes with adult Simone kissing her neighbour meshing with those when the killer was trying to kiss her and she bit off his tongue -- what?! I don't think any of these things actually happened. As I said, I think this was all occurring within Simone's hypnotized state.

I think it all had to do with how time is perceived, according to the lecturer's account. There was mention of movement through time leading to death, and of how time could be sped up or slowed down depending on disparate viewpoints.

It was all a bit too murky. There was never any mention of what happened to Simone's cousin. Did he ever recover? The motives behind her mother's death were never brought up either. Was it just a senseless murder?

The best film I've seen on time travel (I don't believe this film is really about time travel though) is Donnie Darko. That was really quite a ride!

And all the pieces matter (The Wire)