20130813: Mystery review--Exit

Name: Exit (2011)
IMDb: link to Exit

Genres: Psychological Drama.    Country of origin: Australia.

Cast: Kylie Trounson as Alice, Michael Finney as Simon, Hannah Moore as Grace, Drew Tingwell as David, David Whitely as Tom, 

Directed by: Marek Polgar.      Written by: Martyn Pedlar.

The Three Acts

The initial tableau: 
The film is set entirely in a nameless Australian city.  Graffiti and broken and degenerating building materials are used to illustrate urban decay.  These images are paired against huge, great, new, seemingly perfect sky scrapers.  

People are distinguished in similar fashion.  Some are poor, and many of these have a shared delusion that the city has only one exit, and that exit is somehow hidden by powerful forces.  In contrast, other groups are wealthy with deep resource bases.

Delineation of conflicts:

The lost battle their own delusions by questing after the unique illusory exit.  Some spend hundreds of hours keeping track of their 'progress' in searching for the exit: some use 3D models, others paper accounting, others maps and notations.  

Still others give up and flee into addiction to substances that temporarily stop thinking.  These folk are sometimes the victims of criminals.

Some appeal to the rich for assistance; this appeal often fails.

A precious few try to achieve mental health by shucking off their delusions.

Resolution:
What are the usual exits for the lost? Some die from substance abuse, or from failing to pay the criminals from their limited resources.  Some of the deluded stay deluded.  Do any of them break through their imaginary problems?

One line summary: Psychological drama: nothing new, not well executed.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 4/10 Hulu+ claimed to be streaming in HD, but there were jumps in the video, indicating missing frames.  Some of the video is stunningly good, some is annoyingly bad.  Do I care to see acres of graffiti?  I see it in real life, and despise it there.  I have no reason to like the same sort of crap in a movie.  It is just as ugly, and does not advance the plot.  The same sort of criticism applies to the study of the decay of metal, brick, wood, and other building materials.  I don't want to waste my time viewing thousands of frames glorifying ugliness with attendant rotten background music.

Shot in colour, but feels like black and white, for the dreariness, depression, and lack of optimism evoked by the impoverished pallette. Filmed in Melbourne and Victoria.

Sound: 4/10 The incidental music might appeal more to the Australian sensibility than to mine.  The actors seem to be miked OK so that I could hear what they are saying.

Acting: 2/10 Poor.  I do not believe any of these characters feel any obsession.  They are hitting their marks, reading their lines, and not getting paid much beyond receiving billing on a low budget film.

Screenplay: 2/10 Breaks the fourth wall.  Automatic deduction of marks.  I don't care for characters talking directly to me when the work is one of fiction.  After all the spaghetti plot, the end comes when one character brightens up and realises, 'my obsession really was nonsense.'  As with many psychological dramas, the problems and pain are in the heads of the characters, not in the common view of reality.  Resolution comes when one character gets out of the trap of their own making.  The biggest problem with this film is that I found none of the characters engaging, for which I fault the writing.

Alternates: Try Marnie (1964) with Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery, Moby Dick (1956) with Gregory Peck, Vertigo (1958) with James Stewart.  These are all psychological dramas and are all good movies.  The difference is that these films had good screenplays, good directors, and good actors.  More recent better psychological drama movies include Memento (2000),  Mulholland Drive (2001), and the monarch of them all, The Sixth Sense (1999), with Bruce Willis.


Final Rating: 2/10, two blackholes for acting and screenplay.