Jimmy Dougan’s review published on Letterboxd:
With First Reformed, The Card Counter and Master Gardener it felt like Paul Schrader was delivering his own eulogy, etching on stone a treatise on what the world was but also what it could be. Oh, Canada is a film about a man so wracked with guilt for getting too much pussy when he was young that he moves to Quebec.
It’s a meandering, muddled trawl of a film: thanks to the performances of Gere and the GOAT Thurman it’s at the very least consistently gripping - one scene in a Chinese restaurant towards the end, one of the best scenes from any film this year, makes the rest of it worth sitting through - but it’s so obvious that this thing just died in the edit. The pacing is nonexistent and scenes just kind of spool out repetitively, the music is faintly ridiculous and it dips its toes into some pretty deep ponds but plunges into none.
But what’s most disappointing about Oh, Canada is that it could’ve been directed by absolutely anyone else on the planet. It feels so rote, so workmanlike in its construction, so perfunctory in the way it reaches for a sense of ‘arthouse prestige’ that I can’t quite believe Schrader was even in the room when this was made.
What the hell happened?
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