Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!

SanEat A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Melanie Bouvet The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Married Baby Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

grantss As a young girl Ana was a rebellious child. She was also tormented by images of death and a shadowy, ominous figure in black. Now an adult, she is once again tormented by shadowy, other-worldly forms.An extraordinary feat. In making this movie the director(s) managed to turn 15 minutes of meaningless and random plot into a 90-minute movie. Done by doing almost everything in slow motion and repeating one action over and over, often without even changing the camera angle. Incredibly pretentious and containing no substance whatsoever this movie is truly devoid of any positive qualities. Avoid at all costs and save yourself some time.

bartkl-1 Fluctuating between abstract eroticism and surreal, paranoid mysticism, this film certainly is weird. Surprisingly enough though, it becomes less vague while pertaining the surreal style. As the film progresses, it seems so that the entire bizarre nature of the film is the reality of Ana, who's not just a weird little girl, but actually turns out to be a disturbed mentally ill person, like a autistic paranoid schizophrenic.She is extremely sensory/perceptive and also sensual in a more erotic and carnal way, as is shown beautifully using closeups of lips, eyes, legs, etcetera. Not to forget the extreme intensity of light now and then, and to accentuate the sensory aspect also the use of primary colors, filing an entire shot. The visual style is very creative, and feels really authentic to me. It's minimal and focusing: everything serves to demonstrate the reality of Ana.All the mystic amulet stuff in the beginning, which invites you to try to make sense of it all, turns out to be the little girl's condition using her imagination to make up this reality. There's no mysterious amulet, neither is her grandma trying to hurt her. It's all in her mind, she's very paranoid and frightened. Possibly the shocking discovery of her parents making love while she ran in for help contributed to her weird seductive attitude and carnal desires at adolescent age. She is clearly sick and feels abstract, sexual attraction to the soccer playing youngster, but also with the older motorcyclists.Then she's slightly older, returning to her parental home. She takes a bath, and almost gets drowned by a pair of gloved hands that seem to be the same as those of her grandmother in the beginning. Later when she's trying to sleep, the taxi driver pays her a visit. His intentions are never exactly clear, but he's visiting her at night with a knife, so he's certainly up to no good. However, there seems to be a third person at work, once again the person with the gloved hands. It is in these scenes that I learned that it's actually Ana herself. This becomes even more obvious when she cuts up the taxi driver and takes of the gloves.Ultimately this virtual person chases her again and seems to kill her, which means of course she's committed suicide. One question remains for me though: why does she open her eyes at the end of the film? Personally, I think it's a bad choice that wants to suggests it's unclear whether the final scene is an actual autopsy of her apparent suicide, or another of Ana's delusions. I might be wrong though. It's unclear and I think she should have had her eyes closed ;-).

melvelvit-1 The NY TIMES called AMER "an exercise in giallo (eroticized horror), a richly colorful mosaic of sinister sidelong glances" while the LA TIMES enthused, "a nightmare vision of desire and fear -gorgeous, heady, dazzling!" but these pointed paeans are only partly true. Except for the odd snippet, there's no dialog or musical score in the three vignettes depicting the life of a disturbed young woman (childhood, adolescence, adulthood) and although the last sequence contains elements of the giallo, the film is more of an homage to the indelible images of "maestro of the macabre" Mario Bava.AMER's first segment on a child's reaction to her grandfather's death re-imagines the opening tale in Bava's trilogy I TRE VOLTE DELLA PAURA (aka BLACK SABBATH) from prying a valuable object out of a dead man's hand and the nightmare that follows right down to the dripping water and eerie blue, green, and red light that bathed the terrifying tableaux. The second segment on the girl's dangerous sexual awakening combines Bava's OPERAZIONE PAURA (aka KILL BABY KILL) and it's white soccer ball with the nebulous evil-under-the-sun aura of Tennesse Williams' SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. The third and final scene that sees the young woman revisiting the abandoned villa where she grew up actually does reference BLOOD & BLACK LACE-style gialli with its black gloves, straight razor, and stalking sequence that leads up to a graphic murder. Unfortunately, there's only one (barely set piece) slaying in AMER and this dreamy collage of jump cuts, split screens, and undeniably beautiful imagery is less than the sum of its parts which may prove disappointing to hard-core horror fans. Cineastes -and those who enjoy avant-garde narrative as well as color-drenched kaleidoscopic visuals- should, however, get their money's worth. Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani's offbeat endeavor also reeks of Roman Polanski's REPULSION and I found the "eroticized" exercise admirable but more dull than anything else.

chaos-rampant When I included Amer in a short list of films I was eagerly anticipating in 2010, I wrote that I was looking forward to "ostentatious cameras that go on a discovery of psychosexual nightmares, a stylish violence, jazzy grooves". I'm a big fan of Italian genre cinema, especially gialli, for me they fulfill the needs comic-books do in others. When I say I'm a fan, I mean that when Stelvio Cipriani's song La Polizia Ha Le Mani Legate (originally part of Cipriani's score for Roma Violenta) finished playing in Amer's end credits, I rummaged through my cd collection to find it.But, even as I was writing that a few months ago, Amer already had a reputation as more than a giallo film, "arthouse" people insisted, which intrigued me more. So, does Amer reward the giallo fan with the wink of film reference, or is the giallo only the trope of an expression intended for a different audience? To go back to my appreciation for the giallo as comic book, it's the mentality of the colorful panel that appeals to me, the vivid bits of casual violence to strike a chord and be forgotten after the next page, the indulgence on something that reaches only as deep as the excitement it provides. To put so much effort or go through all the trouble for the pleasure of something momentary, this exaggeration is essentially the province of youth, where the fling of a few days burns with the passion of true love. In this sense, the giallo rejuvenates me.That in mind, Amer is at once an apotheosis and a keelhaul of the panel, an overkill of shots capturing small details, of closeups of eyes or reflections or bits of the human anatomy. It's a world come alive through the senses, by a child overhearing conversations from behind closed doors, or a young girl feeling the first tingling of a booming sexuality in her skin. There's very little dialogue and this appeals to me, because the convoluted plots were always my least favorite aspect of the giallo.But if Amer is not pushed forward by people talking, does it establish other means of communicating this story of sexual awakening and repression, the schism that follows from a child discovering a cruel world or a teenager being denied that discovery on her own? I'll say yes, but with reservations. Still, what's important for me, is the tweaking of the filmed image to see is there another way to make cinema, the nature of an experiment whose results can only be appreciated in the future. Better said, if we peel a cabbage we get the core, but if we peel an onion? Some will say we get nothing, but we've done the peeling and we've transformed the onion, so can we really say that? The cinema of Amer is that peeling.Two things particularly stand out for me here in this cinematic depiction of trauma.One is the root of it, seen through the kaleidoscope of a child's awestruck imagination. A child's feverish nightmare shot in the otherworldly cyans and magentas of Mario Bava, where disfigured old men and strange hooded figures reach out to the camera. This is probably the most horrific part of the movie.The other is the cause and effect of the teenage girl's sexual awakening. The directors explore this with a marvellous sense of exaggeration, of a complete fetishization of sexuality and the human body. When the young girl comes across a group of bikers, we get blurry closeups of chrome, of throats undulating or the trickle of perspiration, of buckles and boots. The girl approaches them almost solemnly, clinging to her short summer dress, with an air of fearful apprehension and the irrepressible instinct of a moth drawn to a flame. Before her discovery can be consumated, her overbearing mother shows up to slap her for the offense and take her away. Simple, crude some may say, but brilliant in getting a point across.It's in the film's conclusion that we find the giallo lurking in the shadows of a ruined mansion, where the black-gloved hand of the killer slashes the dark. The directors give us the killing hand but with a twist, another contraption of the giallo.What about the intended audience though? I feel that Amer will appeal more to fans of the sexual psychodrama of Repulsion, than the fan who will seek out a film like Amuck for the profound pleasure of watching giallo queens Barbara Bouchet and Rosalba Neri make out on the same bed. The lurid tradition of Sergio Martino is only honored in the selection of epochal musis by the likes of Bruno Nicolai, Morricone or Cipriani.