A well-made and glossy chiller, the film has no feeling of being anchored in reality. A talented and attractive woman comes into the orbit of a talented but isolated young man. He has a distorted view of women's sexual availability, gleaned from internet experiences, and someone dies as a result.
The settings and photography are cold. There is a human emptiness that is of the moment but unfulfilling. I am not asking for every story to be a parable or a morality tale, but neither do I believe the world is made up of purely of those who kill and those who lie for them.
I do not understand Amanda Plummer's role. Was she a friend of a friend, shoehorned in to appeal to distributors? What investigation did she do? What happened before Piet met Klara? Did she have no friends to notice what she was doing? What of the professor who introduced them? Klara appears to have written much of their project; no traces? What of the parcels? Piet made few attempts to avoid touching the packing tape or printer labels. Why would an isolated individual like Piet have a sociable friend like Alex?
Klara' family must have suspected foul play (dead people do not dismember themselves), so why choose an investigator with no evident skills? The illegal migrant would become known to authorities whatever she said; why implicate herself as accessory to murder?
Overall the film feels like a half-thought out idea for a plot rather than a choate work. A few ideas are tossed in to cover discrepancies ("I have some money from a company I sold last year"), but there is no sense of who the characters are when they are off-screen, no reference points to explain their motives. A sushi delivery in the middle of the night is a bizarre red herring, while there is no explanation for why Piet would own enough cardboard boxes and packing tape to dispose of the body, or why he would have a parcel trolley sitting around.
If the intention was to make me feel uneasy it succeeded, but so would a Miss World pageant or the dissection of a small mammal. I expect more from a film than an unexplained and inexplicable evening in the company of a loner.
The settings and photography are cold. There is a human emptiness that is of the moment but unfulfilling. I am not asking for every story to be a parable or a morality tale, but neither do I believe the world is made up of purely of those who kill and those who lie for them.
I do not understand Amanda Plummer's role. Was she a friend of a friend, shoehorned in to appeal to distributors? What investigation did she do? What happened before Piet met Klara? Did she have no friends to notice what she was doing? What of the professor who introduced them? Klara appears to have written much of their project; no traces? What of the parcels? Piet made few attempts to avoid touching the packing tape or printer labels. Why would an isolated individual like Piet have a sociable friend like Alex?
Klara' family must have suspected foul play (dead people do not dismember themselves), so why choose an investigator with no evident skills? The illegal migrant would become known to authorities whatever she said; why implicate herself as accessory to murder?
Overall the film feels like a half-thought out idea for a plot rather than a choate work. A few ideas are tossed in to cover discrepancies ("I have some money from a company I sold last year"), but there is no sense of who the characters are when they are off-screen, no reference points to explain their motives. A sushi delivery in the middle of the night is a bizarre red herring, while there is no explanation for why Piet would own enough cardboard boxes and packing tape to dispose of the body, or why he would have a parcel trolley sitting around.
If the intention was to make me feel uneasy it succeeded, but so would a Miss World pageant or the dissection of a small mammal. I expect more from a film than an unexplained and inexplicable evening in the company of a loner.