This movie denied me catharsis, and I loved it for that.
I'm so glad you've seen it! In theaters, or is it actually streaming somewhere?
I hope that the average audience member on the street is still informed enough about recent history to get what's going on in this movie and why it's scary.
I hope so, too. The loss of living memory makes everything easier to render unreal. I have not liked watching the rise of that. Of course, that's also one of the movie's points.
(I just finished typesetting a play about a white Southern family who are all in denial that racism is even a thing. I may be an angry historian right now. Which was what the play intended to do to me, so yeah.)
(Good job, theater! What play?)
On a shallower and more immediate front, the friend I saw it with agreed with me that the part of this movie that scared us the most was the wedding itself.
Absolutely. It starts out just kind of ordinarily overstimulating and it turns into Walpurgisnacht.
I thought the woman on the ferry was Zaneta, having cut her hair and changed into casual clothes to go out into the world and find Piotr. But I'm not great with faces--maybe she was an unrelated character, like the screaming woman in the water at the beginning.
SPOILER FOR PEOPLE WHO CARE
You can trust your eye for faces a little more. It is Żaneta. She is wearing her husband's jacket—proof positive that he was real, the last scrap of evidence after Ronaldo quarry-sunk the Range Rover—and she's leaving the place where people live without memory. I actually think the second half of the movie is a lot more about her, since we lose Piotr's perspective after he's possessed. But no, it is not the kind of story where she saves everyone. She isn't given the chance; her family keeps interfering and then her husband disappears. But she does not, after all, love the place where she grew up more than she loves Piotr, even the memory of him.
I had never heard the song that the Professor sings sung in Yiddish before.
I could have sworn I had a recording by Theodore Bikel, but if so it's not on my computer. Here's the one I've got: Michael Zoosman, "Rozhinkes mit mandlen."
I am glad your friend learned Yiddish as an adult.
There is a possible mundane interpretation of events, where that pretty-faced guy dumping the car at the end of the film is getting rid of Piotr's body in the car trunk, having murdered him (and presumably re-murdered the dybbuk) to get rid of the problem.
FURTHER SPOILERS FOR PEOPLE WHO CARE
That came up after the screening at the MFA: I read it as Ronaldo disposing of the evidence, erasing any hint of Piotr's presence in town. Whatever that one glimpse of the photograph in the ruins of the farmhouse means (he's gone back into the past, he came out of it originally, he's in the world of the dead, mix and match), it pretty strongly inclines me against any interpretation where there's a body to dump in the present day. But it is ominous and I can't imagine it's not meant to be.
I don't think anything bad happens to Szymon. Because he's the last living link to the wartime past that everyone wants to disclaim, if he had been murdered or otherwise made to vanish, I think we would have seen it, just as we saw the car dumped and the farmhouse torn down. Barring Ronaldo, I'm not sure we see anyone from the wedding party again after Zygmunt's reality-unmaking speech. Everything dissolves and disappears by the end of the film, except for Żaneta and her memories.
no subject
I'm so glad you've seen it! In theaters, or is it actually streaming somewhere?
I hope that the average audience member on the street is still informed enough about recent history to get what's going on in this movie and why it's scary.
I hope so, too. The loss of living memory makes everything easier to render unreal. I have not liked watching the rise of that. Of course, that's also one of the movie's points.
(I just finished typesetting a play about a white Southern family who are all in denial that racism is even a thing. I may be an angry historian right now. Which was what the play intended to do to me, so yeah.)
(Good job, theater! What play?)
On a shallower and more immediate front, the friend I saw it with agreed with me that the part of this movie that scared us the most was the wedding itself.
Absolutely. It starts out just kind of ordinarily overstimulating and it turns into Walpurgisnacht.
I thought the woman on the ferry was Zaneta, having cut her hair and changed into casual clothes to go out into the world and find Piotr. But I'm not great with faces--maybe she was an unrelated character, like the screaming woman in the water at the beginning.
SPOILER FOR PEOPLE WHO CARE
You can trust your eye for faces a little more. It is Żaneta. She is wearing her husband's jacket—proof positive that he was real, the last scrap of evidence after Ronaldo quarry-sunk the Range Rover—and she's leaving the place where people live without memory. I actually think the second half of the movie is a lot more about her, since we lose Piotr's perspective after he's possessed. But no, it is not the kind of story where she saves everyone. She isn't given the chance; her family keeps interfering and then her husband disappears. But she does not, after all, love the place where she grew up more than she loves Piotr, even the memory of him.
I had never heard the song that the Professor sings sung in Yiddish before.
I could have sworn I had a recording by Theodore Bikel, but if so it's not on my computer. Here's the one I've got: Michael Zoosman, "Rozhinkes mit mandlen."
I am glad your friend learned Yiddish as an adult.
There is a possible mundane interpretation of events, where that pretty-faced guy dumping the car at the end of the film is getting rid of Piotr's body in the car trunk, having murdered him (and presumably re-murdered the dybbuk) to get rid of the problem.
FURTHER SPOILERS FOR PEOPLE WHO CARE
That came up after the screening at the MFA: I read it as Ronaldo disposing of the evidence, erasing any hint of Piotr's presence in town. Whatever that one glimpse of the photograph in the ruins of the farmhouse means (he's gone back into the past, he came out of it originally, he's in the world of the dead, mix and match), it pretty strongly inclines me against any interpretation where there's a body to dump in the present day. But it is ominous and I can't imagine it's not meant to be.
I don't think anything bad happens to Szymon. Because he's the last living link to the wartime past that everyone wants to disclaim, if he had been murdered or otherwise made to vanish, I think we would have seen it, just as we saw the car dumped and the farmhouse torn down. Barring Ronaldo, I'm not sure we see anyone from the wedding party again after Zygmunt's reality-unmaking speech. Everything dissolves and disappears by the end of the film, except for Żaneta and her memories.