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Rating:
From such a Radiohead-like title, I expected something cannibalistic, but instead here I am served a donut with a hole... with another donut inside. Linguistic and metanarrative games to explain without explaining the Chinese box screenplay of Rian Johnson's film.
It's practically impossible to talk about it without risking spoiling the viewing. If you go on, do it at your own risk. A mystery that dusts off its deliberately flaunted Agatha Christie veneer, almost as a parody. It slowly disowns it, until it turns everything upside down, a postmodern topsy-turvy that sardonically plays with expectations, plays with cinema and its prefabricated, worn-out structures.
At every moment, everything is clear and nothing is clear. The truth is deceptive even in its certainties, the distance between outward facts (even verified) and inner motivations (second-degree truths, truer than the factual truth) requires continuous verification. Yet everything flows almost linearly, it seems to lead a completely atypical mystery, a non-mystery mystery, focused not so much on the whodunit, but on another dynamic, on the perpetrator's fabrication of evidence, with whom we empathize. On the hope that the author of the crime gets away with it, that the investigator believes in the suicide.
But is the author a true author? Is the suicide a true suicide?
A simple presentation, original from conception, and thus without the need to force it. Enriched with irony, empathy, character investigation, sociopolitical subtext. Then the simplicity takes a sudden twist, and inside the donut is another one. Sweeter.
If for the cast you then take a holographic prostitute from Blade Runner and Bond from 007 (plus many others), well, it means you’re thinking big. A skilled director, who knows how to use the shots, the sets, the close-ups (the faces are never pleonastic. They speak). Johnson knows how to bend his story as he wishes, with irreverence. He knows how to stab our imagination in the back and make it bleed with joy for cinema.
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