Eric Boellner
Well-known member
Mini-review: Pretty good movie. 6.5/10, IMHO. Has a poor rating on RT and IMDb, but a lot of the major critics liked it (with the exception of Ebert). Still, there were a few tense scenes -- not a lot of scares, but a hell of a lot of prolonged tension.
Technical notes: The film's "gimick," if you will, is that it plays out as one single, 78-minute continuous take. This is obviously an illusion, hidden (not so well) by pans across doors and having characters move around objects which obscure them and then reemerge on the other side. The directors admitted that the film is actually about 10-13 takes, strung together. Either way, the single-take does a lot to add tension to the film; aside from Olsen's solid performance, this probably does the most to help the film stay tense.
The film was shot on a Canon 5D mkII with Zeiss compact primes. When the cameraman was running in the exterior shots, you could see a decent amount of the rolling shutter type issues of the 5D, but the only thing that really bothered me was the f--king vignette that was all over the edges of the screen in the exteriors.
Still, the camera itself held up well and it was obvious why they chose it for long-as-s**t steadicam shots moving all throughout a tight-cornered house.
Random notes: I wore my watch to the theater and "timed" some of the major beats of the film. Most interesting was that the first real scare didn't come till 21 minutes into the film. A fake scare came 2 minutes later (23:00), and then a "follow-up" real scare a minute after that (24:00). The first real plot twist (after she can't find her dad) came, I think, at around 32:00. The film itself timed out to 78 minutes (runtime = 85m with credits and logos).
Anyone else seen this film?
-JMT
Technical notes: The film's "gimick," if you will, is that it plays out as one single, 78-minute continuous take. This is obviously an illusion, hidden (not so well) by pans across doors and having characters move around objects which obscure them and then reemerge on the other side. The directors admitted that the film is actually about 10-13 takes, strung together. Either way, the single-take does a lot to add tension to the film; aside from Olsen's solid performance, this probably does the most to help the film stay tense.
The film was shot on a Canon 5D mkII with Zeiss compact primes. When the cameraman was running in the exterior shots, you could see a decent amount of the rolling shutter type issues of the 5D, but the only thing that really bothered me was the f--king vignette that was all over the edges of the screen in the exteriors.
Still, the camera itself held up well and it was obvious why they chose it for long-as-s**t steadicam shots moving all throughout a tight-cornered house.
Random notes: I wore my watch to the theater and "timed" some of the major beats of the film. Most interesting was that the first real scare didn't come till 21 minutes into the film. A fake scare came 2 minutes later (23:00), and then a "follow-up" real scare a minute after that (24:00). The first real plot twist (after she can't find her dad) came, I think, at around 32:00. The film itself timed out to 78 minutes (runtime = 85m with credits and logos).
Anyone else seen this film?
-JMT
