The second film on day 4 of Toronto After Dark 2011 was Love. I wasn’t sure what to make of this movie at first, besides the fact that it looked beautiful. Of course, The Tree of Life looked beautiful as well and I didn’t exactly enjoy that.
Well, Love wound up being almost the same. It starts out simple enough, with an astronaut finding himself trapped in a space station after it looks like life has been wiped out on Earth. Years pass as he slowly goes crazy. Suddenly, the film takes a strange turn when he discovers a journal onboard that chronicles the discovery of a life changing object in the civil war.
It’s at that point where the film veers into really strange territory and basically lost me. In my head, it makes sense. The problem is that there’s no way I could explain what it means to me.
That’s kind of unfortunate because up until a certain point, the film is incredible. Some of the shots are dizzying and watching Gunner Wright as Captain Lee Miller can be mesmerizing. His descent into lonely madness is an amazing performance. In fact, everything about the early parts of the film are incredible. The sets and effects are incredible, and all made on a very small budget in a very small area. Like I said earlier, it looks incredible. It’s the end of the film that starts to ruin it for me.
Gunner Wright is amazing in his role.
After spending an hour watching a character go crazy, it becomes hard to believe anything that happens onscreen. This led me to have a very different opinion of the film compared to others that saw it. When the film shifts towards the end, it seems to leave a lot of people behind. I’m not sure I was ready for all that thinking by this point in the festival. It was certainly more deep than I was expecting. It also works for some great conversation after though. Listening to other opinions on what had happened in the movie and comparing ideas was great fun. I kind of wish there had been a more straight forward answer at the end of it all though.
Stunning visuals mix with a great soundtrack and an incredible performance.
There’s so many great points about the movie that is going to be lost when viewers hit that last 20 minutes. It all makes sense in my head, but I don’t think I could ever explain that to others. I tried my best but could never get across the exact way I felt. You may start to feel a little alone, much like Captain Miller in the film, and your experience will obviously be affected by your ideas of life, death, and the role of man in the universe.
This is probably the most deep film I’ve seen at TAD before and I’m not sure how well it went over with the audience. Just between myself and my friends that I chatted with after, we were left with varying degrees of like and dislike. I tend to fall somewhere in the middle. I can appreciate how the film leaves you pondering what you’ve just seen, but I can also see how a more clear answer at the end would serve to expand the film to a wider audience.
In the shadows – Will
