Edgar Cochran ✝️’s review published on Letterboxd:
One of the most hilarious films of all time, one that had me in tears from beginning to end, an expectations surpasser, a continuity defier, a surreal adventure of absurdism taken to the extreme!! This is the most intelligent bizarre class satire of the last 13 years since The Temptation of St. Tony (2009); the strong lineup of best films of 2022 didn’t prepare me for the absolute utter genius of a film like this: an episodic deconstruction of the high class and the fashion industry, yet again, in a sea of credit cards, carats, money, superficiality, etiquette, vomit, excrement, and... a literal sea. I don’t remember watching a desecration of the luxurious so well constructed and eloquently written as a mixture of Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty (1974) and Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990) ever in my life. Even the Deus Ex-Machina derivative from Huston’s immensely misunderstood masterpiece The African Queen (1951) is a fantastic nod that is played for the sake of role reversals: strip the “high class” from their supposedly deserved financial resources because possessing a specific physique, put them in an island and let character dominate: William Golding’s ideas are progressively becoming proved hypothesis rather than literary plot arguments!
Östlund, you mad, misunderstood genius. This film is not meant for this era, but screw the haters that do not get the film’s wittiness, the nearly unmatched poetic directing and asphyxiating camerawork in the tradition of non-U.S. Orson Welles, or the “I-cannot-find-a-character-to-connect-with” claimers: this is an absolute triumph in the genre-fluid comedy department, the new exterminating angel twisting the ride at every turn, offering a map and betraying it at the last minute, showing the true character of each... character. You cannot hide your essence behind a mask, a façade, as light, at the end, finds its way to shine in the faces of everybody, and that light comes from your face.
Using New Noise by Refused during a pivotal scene (as the director is used to have AN iconic scene per film) is one of the smartest music choices in movies since the closing credits song of Gummo (1997), and to all of us that grew up with that song during primary school back in the 90s, let us recite loudly:
CAN I SCREAM?
YEAH!
WE LACK THE MOTION
TO MOVE TO THE NEW BEAT!
96/100
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