The Bad Guy

Wow. I’m really not sure what I was expected to take away from this movie. How brutal, twisted, and ugly love can be? Something like that? Whatever the message, I guess I’m an idiot because I had trouble seeing it. And if that was the only message… well, I already knew all that… I certainly didn’t need to watch a girl becoming an unwilling prostitution in order to understand such a thing.

It was hard and disturbing to watch… and I’m afraid I had trouble understanding the motivations for both the main character and the college-girl-turned-hooker… especially towards the end. They were both full of contradictions, so I wasn’t sure which part of their personalities I could believe was ‘real’—if any facets of them were. Perhaps that’s where the two-way mirror comes in—playing with the idea that nobody really knows who they are—that we only see what we want to see. And of course there had to be something about reflections in there—like, when they broke the mirror together, our sense of reality was shifted or reversed, and we were shown an alternate reality where they were happy being ‘bad’—or being bad was ‘good’.

Haha, yeah, I know it’s a HUGE stretch. Plus it sounds shallow and stupid… but my mind is like mush right now... but at least trying to find meaning where there is none, is fun, right?! ;)

The play on the photographs, however, was really intriguing and interesting… especially the way he superimposed the main characters face using the mirror. And the woman with the red dress was a strong visual: I have little doubt in my mind they were headed down the same path as her. After all, no story like this could possibly end happily, right?

…Right???

What it comes down to though, is that I’m not really sure what I should be taking away from this movie—what I should feel.

Disgusted? Angry? Annoyed? Disturbed? Pity?

Well, at least it got me thinking and questioning things… that’s a vast improvement over my initial reaction. But I still think it was lacking something: I wasn’t blown away like with Crocodile or 3 Iron. But I guess the film wasn’t too “bad”… (haha, yay for crappy puns). In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think there’s more to the plot than my simple mind is able to comprehend.

At least I hope there is… otherwise, this was nothing but a glorified porno with an abundance of mirror motifs. =P

My Rating: