Sombre (1998) User Reviews

Sombre: morality not included

[Comix · 7/10 · 10 November 1999]

Tonight 'Sombre' premiered in the Netherlands. Present in the audience was the director of Sombre, mr. Philippe Grandrieux. He is known mostly as a maker of documentaries and videos, and it shows in Sombre, his first movie. Shaking camera's (he told the audience he shot most of the footage with a 35mm camera (about 24 kilo's heavy, that's gotta hurt at the end of the day), extreme close-ups and experiments with dark and light. It absolutely complements the story.

About the story. It tells the story of Jean (Marc Barbé), a man that has many sexual encounters with women, but ends up killing them. Why, we do not know. I think he tries to love women, but at the end his lust takes over and controls him. After a couple encounters he meets a woman played by Elina Lowensohn. Apparantly she's something else. She also has a history she's not completely happy with (why we don't know) and she joins Jean with her sister. It doesn't take long before Jean tries to rape and kill the sisters. They escape. But apparently she is somehow touched by Jean, a touch she can't forget (a romantic vision about love, says Grandrieux). She goes back to him. They have sex but at the end Jean drives her away. He can't be with her, because for the first (in the movie) time he experiences love, but he still can't control his lust and she can't be with him because she might end up being dead. Oh bitter irony...The movie ends with spectators of the Tour de France, a metaphor for reality watching this morbid fairy tale. And it is a bit of a fairy tale. Jean is a puppet player. He does a show in front of crowd of children (one of the best scenes in the film). He plays the wolf, the Beast! Eline plays the Beauty ( at the end of the film, I have my doubts about that, but anyway...).

It's a difficult movie! Grandrieux tells us that one of his main influences is the silent movie. Silent movies have spots on the film, the cuts are clearly visible, it's rough, 'it stays in the ears, even when you can't hear the sound'. And Sombre is rough and dirty. In some scenes you can almost touch objects, for example hair or a woman's thy. Other scenes are very serene and still, but you still feel the objects. Grandrieux tells us that he want to make the audience edit the movie realtime. And that was exactly what I did. You need some imagination with this picture, you have to fill in the blanks, because not much information and dialogue is given to you. What Grandriex achieves with this, is a connection between the audience and the film. 'Edit the movie the same time you are watching it'. Man, you gotta love that one.

Still, I would liked to have some more info on the characters and their history. I liked to know what makes them do the things they do. Now they are just doing them. And with almost no moral in it. There are some scenes where the theme hope is explored, but you got to dig deep. That results in dividing the audience in two teams. You either like it or you hate it. One more thing, the music. The music by Alan Vega is excellent.

See this movie, make your own story of it and make your own conclusions. Sombre is good material for the eyes and ears and the mind. Phillipe Grandrieux is a kind man who tought that the only way he could express his feelings with this theme, was by film. I rate it 7 out of 10.

Just too dark for its own good.

[Boba_Fett1138 · 5/10 · 10 June 2012]

You have movies that are dark because of its style and tone and then there also are movies that are just dark due to a lack of light. And this movie decided so simply use no lights at all, even while the movie is mostly taking place during the nighttime, which causes most of the movie to be just too dark for its own good.

It would had been nice to see more of what was going on at times. I just really couldn't always tell what was happening and you might call it an artistic choice, or something along those lines but I call it cheap and ridicules. I mean it's a movie! You are supposed to be able to tell what is going on, by using your eyes.

This all really prevented me from ever getting into this movie. But besides all of that, I don't think that this movie would had intrigued me any better if it got shot with more light. The story is just too simplistic for that and it isn't really following a main plot to begin with.

Sure, I get it. This is supposed to be a movie that puts us into the mind of serial killer but it doesn't really ever do this in a very engaging way. The main character, besides being a killer, is also a rapist. This makes him even less sympathetic and even makes you more repulsed toward him and the entire movie in general, since there is a whole lot of hard, loveless, sex going on in this movie. Not that I ever was able to see much of it tough.

The movie just never got interesting for me and it failed to put me into the mind of a serial killer. There are numerous movies out there that did a far better job, with a similar sort of premise and setup. Movies like "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" or "Schramm" for example. Or even some cheap TV movies or television series episodes. In other words; it was not so much its concept but more its execution, that was wrong with this movie.

It's a movie that picks a more stylized approach to things and almost wants to be seen and taken as an artistic movie. But really, the movie just isn't being deep and engaging enough for that. It instead is a very distant movie, that doesn't delves into anything.

It's not a horrible movie, or one that I hated seeing (if I ever could see anything that is) but it just is one that fails at ever becoming interesting or engaging enough to watch.

5/10

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Is She Really Going Out With Him?

[loganx-2 · 7/10 · 9 May 2010]

Nauseating it is but, genuinely striking film making at work, both disorientating and disturbing in equal measure. If nothing else Grandrieux like Von Treir's "Antichrist" raises the bar for horror films here, but doesn't rely on "gore" and shock the way VT did, instead generating fear from a soundtrack of guttural human cries, moans, noises, and silences, and bringing us unbearably close to characters and sensations we desperately and instinctively want to avoid.

I still think the combination of fairy tale logic into such a brutal close focus doesn't gel as much as Grandieux believes it does, but there is something to be said for the notion that complete sentimentality and utter depravity are closer than they appear. I felt like an insect watching this movie, pinned to a wall of sounds and images. Not a good feeling, but horror films are not supposed to create good feelings are they. What's most horrifying about this film is it's lack of any moral aim, for all there terrors horror films do usually show the triumph of a "final girl" or the humanity of a monster, but like "The Descent" Grandrieux's universe is an unstable chaos of actions, desires, and terrors, but more so because even the logical rules of cause and effect, are no good here (like Funny Games' remote control scene but stronger and stranger), in one scene Claire and Christine escape Jean, only to have him magically appear in front of their car. Next cut he has them in his hotel, seemingly hypnotized as he for lack of a better word...sniffs their fear.

What's so violating about a scene like this is not the violation that goes on within it, but the breaking of narrative rules that we depend on in a film like this, for respite, the chance to escape to breath. Sombre is suffocating, and makes even "love" itself, normally a redeeming force, a horror to behold.

My first impression of Claire's attraction to Jean was echoing the Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out With Him?". I felt not the usual jealously one feels when the object of your affection is publicly affectionate to the worst possible kind of person (or a decent person who is transformed into a monstrous caricature through sheer force of jealously alone), but one of panic. She does not know what she is getting into but we (the audience) do, having witnessed albeit elliptically at times Jeans earlier crimes. Eventually she does know who and what Jean is after he attacks her sister, but her attraction seems to intensify as our repulsion grows, and at first I felt this as a failure of understanding character development (no rational human being would willingly go back to THAT). But this was a failure more on my part than the films.

I was expecting realism, when right from the beginning the film announces itself as not existing in a stable mental landscape of coherent naturalism. Our first images are a boy blindfolded in a field feeling his way in the air, then abruptly the sounds of children laughing like hyenas as they watch a Punch And Judy show.The hand-held camera at times jostles around with Jean's or a detached third party pov and at others holds itself sustaining agonizing close ups, all to create it's own kind of rationality(something after watching more Guy Maddin and Mark Rappaport I find a little easier to understand or at least accept).

Claire and Jean's relationship is non-existent guided by the films only symbolic logic(chance or reason/hope), a prop like the puppets in Punch And Judy, but where Mister Punch, would kill his wife, his family, his jailers, and in some versions even Death and The Devil himself, and do so with a smile, Jean wrestles with his demons which are indistinguishable from his desires, and suffers for them. The film's final shots of Jean in the woods recall Lon Chaney Jr's. performance as "The Wolfman"(1941), and all the tragedy, doom, and masculine anxiety there in. In the days of 'Dexter" where serial killers can be heroes too, were all aware that wolves can wear human skin, and men don't need to transform into monsters to make beasts of themselves.

In Fellini's "La Strada" where a lovely clownish child-woman is hopelessly and helplessly in love with a brutish strong man who rapes, torments, and abandons her, we are forced to see "love" as a beastly thing which traps our heroin from the rational action of escape. But it's this break with realism and into the metaphorical which freed Fellini from the other Italian filmmakers of the day and allowed him to progress into his trademark oneiric style, and it's also what gives "La Strada" it's emotional impact, which has to be weighed symbolically not literally. "Sombre" in many ways follows suit, but with more neo-Gothic, and new french extremist aesthetics.

"Sombre" is a difficult film, one which even the most willing to attempt to understand it, will not enjoy the first, second, or maybe any times watching it. I can't say I enjoyed it. I'm not gonna put this on during rainy day like "Slim Sussie" or "Monster Squad", but if I had a friend over who told me they were in the mood for a horror movie, something actually scary (a rarity) I would suggest this.

"...if my eyes don't deceive me, There's something going wrong around here..." -Joe Jackson

An eye for sordid darkness

[chaos-rampant · 10 March 2012]

This was recommended to me as a similar thing to Austrian serial killer film Angst, as subversive horror constructed by the serial eye. Horror that is the unmediated present moment with none of the fictions around it that we use to justify watching.

Now Angst operated a two-fold camera: up close to violence and far away from it as possible, allowing human madness within the framework of an abstract world.

It was a powerful exercise for this reason: this second camera was pivotally ours. How did we handle this view away from violence? Did it provide relief or was it merely a distraction that got in the way of our enjoyment?

This goes the extra mile. It eliminates the latter type of camera, the bird's eye view, that is in essence the spiritual eye that can see far and wide and encompass the world, in doing so eliminates clarity, coherence, sense, centeredness, and solely invests itself in the internal camera intimately capturing motions and landscapes of deranged soul. The effect is uncanny: a patchwork of frantic, jittery, blurred, incomplete, half-visible glimpses of a mind struggling no longer to make sense - as we did in Angst - but to simply exist inside the world it frames and transforms images from.

Naturally the film is French, and can be traced all the way back to the kaleidoscopic motions of L'Herbier and Epstein, back to the 20's when film was still something you engineered for the eye. Photogenie, as Epstein was fond of calling the effect, a world in flux.

The film would be worth watching for just this, justified for just the roaming vision. But we have another effect on top of this, more explicitly self-referential about what it means to want to see. Our man is a puppeteer, the opening scene is presumably one of his shows, coated in darkness, before an audience of screaming children. Then he goes on his raping spree, attracted to sex that invites a prying gaze - one is a stripper, as far as I could make out. The whole is threaded around the Tour of France, a big cycling event that lasts for three weeks. He orbits for some time around people wanting to see, in a sense lusting for spectacle.

We don't though, we don't see. For the most part the film unfolds across twilight hour, our sight cramped by the night. We keep watching though. Worse yet, we keep trying to make out the show's sordid details.

Two soliloquies bookend the claustrophobic tunnel vision, both of them memories. One layers the film as sudden, frightful pain from childhood. The other as another random turn in the random turns of a meaningless world where lovers impulsively check into a hotel in Paris, visiting the city of lights for the first time, and eleven days later the man is simply dead.

Sombre

[jboothmillard · 4/10 · 3 April 2020]

This French film was previously featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I'd never heard of it beforehand, but being listed in the book I was hoping it was title that deserved its placement. Basically, it is about a sexually frustrated serial killer Jean (Marc Barbé) who follows the Tour de France cycling race in his car. During the journey, he takes a liking to picking up many women, most being prostitutes. Those women he picks up he takes to his room, has sex with or pleasures them, and then murders them, most often by strangulation. One day, a virginal, psychologically troubled and confused young woman named Claire (Elina Löwensohn) and her sister Christine (Géraldine Voillat) have a car breakdown. Jean offers them a lift, but he finds himself attracted to Claire, without feeling any urge to kill her. As Jean continues to follow the race, he continues to murder other women, whilst also maintaining a relationship with Claire. She is unaware of Jean's horrific crimes and finds herself falling in love with him, and vice versa. There is a point when Claire gives herself to Jean, while he later attacks Christine while she's swimming in a lake. It is unclear if his killing stops afterwards, but Claire is interviewed by authorities, but it is clear that the cycling race continues without him. Barbé gives a suitably creepy performance as the demented killer, while Löwensohn is alright as the innocent girl foolishly infatuated with him. The plot is rather thin, it could have been much more dramatic, a lot of the action takes place in the dark which means the visuals are not always clear, but perhaps that is the point, it is very slow-paced as well (apart from the cycling haha), and a little boring, a rather average psychological thriller. Okay!

Protracted journey into one man's personal hell is interminable

[fertilecelluloid · 2/10 · 7 March 2006]

Jean (Marc Barbe) is driven by a desire to annihilate women. He strangles several in this protracted journey into his personal hell. Philippe Grandrieux, who made the boring "La Vie Nouvelle", manages to create a modestly concrete narrative here. It is an experimental piece. It may work for some. It didn't work for me. The director often shoots his subjects out of focus for reasons that remain unclear. The editing is adequate, the dialog is sketchy, the performances have a disconnected quality, though they don't lack realism. Ideas and themes are tossed around, but nothing is addressed directly. The sound mix is haunting and some of the driving sequences have the quality of a very bad dream. "Sombre" is a film of personal indulgences. I found the pace interminable and felt relieved that my suffering was over when the credits rolled.

Panic attacks

[jarmic6 · 9/10 · 24 February 2012]

Far from morality and any kind of convention, Sombre is a film that's all about seeing the world through the eyes of a killer. Sound and image on the hand of Grandrieux are combined into something that can only be described as a simulation of a panic attack.

The film is basically about a travelling puppeteer who kills women just before having sex them. Most of these women are prostitutes or strippers and it's natural that when he meets one whose concern is not to arouse him sexually, he finds himself unable to treat her the same. While that may seem contrived, Grandrieux is more concerned with the idea to travelling or moving than the actual story. The plot is there to follow all the changing locations and scenery and along with that the evolving emotions of the two main characters. It's actually real interesting to see that the film suggests that move is most likely the most natural human act, in the sense that being in motion is a type of struggle (interior or exterior) which is the only road to evolution and completion.

Extremely overrated

[DhariaLezin · 3/10 · 27 October 2013]

When I read the plot of this movie, I was really interested in watching it, since I really like French movies. They are not shy in themes like sex, religion, violence, horror, blood, etc. and although the idea of this movie had a lot of potential, for me it was a waste of time. I liked the beginning, but after that, things got from bad to worse. I understand that it is a low budget movie, but that doesn't justify that the action happens so slow, that the photography is extremely dark and won't allow you to catch any details, that there are a lot of shots that work for nothing on the movie, like water on a lake (and since the photography is so dark, it is not even worth a landscape shot), or close ups and long dialogs with characters that are not important in the movie, same as lack of dialogs with characters that are worth knowing more, a camera that was by shoulder almost all the time (that makes the movie awfully tired to watch) and horrible audio, that makes steps on little rocks and water sounds really annoying. The acting is OK and again, the story had a lot of potential, but to me this new wave of "experimental" or "art" film, where supposedly everything is called artistic to justify the lack of budget or the lack of imagination solving budget problems, is not really art movies. Shame, because sadly, for me, even if it sounds as blasphemy to the art movie lovers, a commercial director could have made of the script something agile, maybe scary, and shocking. Specially when the story had so much to offer. The points are because the story is cool (horribly handled), the beginning is nice, and the acting was good too. That's it.

This is definitely not a film

[DUBOSTg · 8/10 · 23 February 1999]

in the usual sense of the term. This is a show for your senses : view of course, but also hear (the music of Alan Vega), smell or touch. The characters are filmed so close you can actually feel them in their gestures, you feel the love, you smell the fear. The picture is very dark, often fuzzy, never stable. It keeps on jumping from the lights of the car, to children's' screams, to womens' hips and hands on their throats. The film has raised a critical debate, some defining it as immoral and almost pornographic, the others considering it a pure chef-d'oeuvre. To my mind, it is both, and more than that. A real experience of cinema.

Sombre

[Scarecrow-88 · 5/10 · 22 December 2008]

I'm pretty sure director Philippe Grandrieux's SOMBRE was supreme festival fodder during it's initial release, but to me it was an aggravating and trivial exercise to sit through. Like other *important* modern filmmakers, Grandrieux adopts a camera style that lenses his subjects often out of focus with the characters at times(..more like most of the time)on the edges of the frame, rarely in a position where we can see them with clarity. This choice is probably applauded by critics and those who appreciate a particular vision(..perhaps mimicking the distorted, warped view of the world in regards to the particular characters features prominently in the film)shown in this film, but I found Grandrieux's style frustrating and difficult. I'd actually prefer to see characters and Philippe Grandrieux's camera always moves, following the actors/actresses around, often jerking and shaking. I consider myself a patient viewer who has tolerated this style for a great deal of time, but it's begun to weigh on my nerves and what's even more tiresome about Philippe Grandrieux's direction here is that his performers, especially Elina Löwensohn as the psychologically troubled and confused Claire in love with volatile, quietly menacing serial killer Jean(Marc Barbé), are very good and deserve to have their work seen clearly without a camera unable to capture every nuance and aching truth presented for the viewer. Sure, if you are attentive enough and completely focus, the viewer is able to catch the performances when the camera stays still long enough.

The film somewhat focuses on a serial killer, Jean, driving through the French countryside as the Tour de France is in full swing, picking up loose women working the streets, clubs and nudie rooms, strangling and suffocating them, leaving their carcasses often in rural areas along river fronts and fields(..or wherever he happens to engage in rough sex, often humiliating them before sticking his fingers down their throat as he initiates his ritual of grabbing their throats, squeezing tightly, covering their mouths pressing the air waves tightly so that oxygen can not be successfully and sufficiently accessed). Jean meets Claire, a very depressed virgin, a beautiful wallflower who seems detached from the world around her, bored and alone. Her free-spirited sister, Christine(Géraldine Voillat)is her polar opposite, actually attempting to seduce Jean, and is an open and vocal woman who has engaged in sexual activity, quite a blunt and frank individual..she's also a model for the type of woman Jean likes to ravage and kill. Once the three start on a journey together, Jean can not control the beast and almost kills Christine before Claire thankfully intervenes. Unable to break free from Jean's grasp, Claire will submit to his will in that Christine can survive without dire harm. But, will Claire be able to survive? Jean will force Claire into the night, having her indulge in drink and dance, but his victim becomes an all too willing subject with unpredictable fireworks sparking between these two troubled souls.

Definitely an ultra-dark character study which features several unpleasant scenes where Jean works over victims before killing them, but the director's haphazard camera doesn't capture these traumatic attacks with any clarity(..there's enough to make those with a faint heart squirm a bit, though and the grunts, screams and pain of the victims certainly convey to the viewer what is happening to them). Löwensohn hits it out of the ball park with a very demanding and complex performance, her character's not an easy nut to crack..one grimaces at her decisions to associate with Jean when she knows the kind of person he truly is, yet embarks on an affair with him anyway risking her life in the process. Barbé shows us the torment he's facing, the monster he can not tame. His face conveys the agony that always pushes him to commit the deeds he does towards "corrupt" women who feed that anguish and desire. This film might test viewers who like a film to remain on the story of these characters because the director likes to show the trivialities of their lives, not concerned with moving in a linear path, freely allowing these people to exist the way they might in real life. Shots of the French countryside, which are often dump sites of the killer, are haunting..as are scenes of the waving water before Jean makes his move to dive in with a goal of possibly killing Christine. The director also opts for minimal music(..the sound of a car on the road with other sounds drowned out;a type of droning as the killer moves to and fro, from one place to another), instead using natural sounds of the environment with which the characters exist, quite effective.

Worth the effort

[hyph-n · 13 May 2002]

There are films that have a very difficult and challenging topic, that may also be very explicit. There are films that are shot in a way that makes them difficult to watch; very quick cuts; rapid camera movement; odd direction. There are films that have a compelling story-line.

This film is all of those.

To begin with, you may be forgiven for thinking that the cinematography methods used here are just to make it look 'arty'. However, as it progresses, I think the extremely dark, edgy, and confused imagery is a reflection of the state of Marc Barbé's mind; closed, confused, searching; helpless. The almost total lack of dialogue adds to the tension, as you are pulled along to an astonishing climax that will leave you thinking.

Whilst you are watching it not everything makes sense, however, in the days that follow, you will find yourself revisiting scenes in you head, wondering what they meant, working some of them out.

Sombre is a very difficult film to watch. It will affect you. You will think about it afterwards. To me, this is what films are all about. What you get out of this film is directly proportional to the amount you put in.

Pointless and artistic exercise in pretentiousness

[mwold · 2/10 · 24 December 2010]

Nearly pointless but artistic exercise in bad filmmaking. Little character development, little plot, little dialog, and little suspense make for a boring movie. Though some of the ideas behind the story hold much potential, and some of the visuals are quite stunning in a freshmen experimental kind of way, the execution is amateurish and artistically over indulgent. Additionally, as incoherent as the plot is, it's also highly unrealistic (not in a good way) and fairly stupid. What's worse, you know how clever and arty the director thought he was being when he orchestrated this mess, even having the audacity to use 'Bela Lugosi's Dead' in one scene. Totally pretentious, totally ridiculous. Not recommended.

Experimental French serial killer movie.

[HumanoidOfFlesh · 8/10 · 5 December 2009]

"Sombre" tells the story of serial killer Jean(Marc Barbe)who murders unfortunate roadside hookers.After erotic play he strangles them to death.Claire(Elina Lowensohn)is a virginal and introverted young woman.She is taken for a ride with him."Sombre" is a bleak serial killer movie filled with dark and brooding atmosphere.The dialogue is kept to a minimum and the killings are shot in the pitch-blackness.The cinematography is stunningly minimalist and disorienting with jerky camera movements and lots of extreme close-ups.The murder scenes leave a lot to the imagination.But being in the dark is far more terrifying than seeing everything.The characters are paper-thin,but the acting is believable and the score by French band Suicide is effective."Sombre" is a step into the gloom.8 out of 10.If you liked Gerald Kargl's "Angst" you can't miss "Sombre".

What a powerful movie!

[sleepsev · 10/10 · 26 September 2000]

For me, this is a very powerful movie. I feel like I was not seeing a movie, but seeing something greater, stronger, and more powerful than "movie". I like every scene in this film. I feel I couldn't breathe when I saw it. It really fascinated and captivated me from the beginning until the end. The acting is also very good. Some actors in this film give the feeling like they were not acting, but "being" their characters. Elina Lowensohn is very great. Her eyes speak much louder and clearer than her words. The lighting, the movement of the camera, the raw feelings expressed from this movie made me feel as if I was not in a cinema, but in the story with all these characters. Hardly a movie can touch or move me this strongly! The joke about the stranded one is a good comment on human nature. The road scenes are hauntingly beautiful. Personally, I think every scene in this movie is indeed "emotionally" beautiful.

The peaceful French countryside from the perspective of a serial killer

[jandeakker · 9/10 · 5 January 2000]

I saw this film at the Rotterdam Film Festival. The response to this film was divided. Some people applauded, others left the theater before the movie ended. It definitely was a film that hit me. The roughness of the cuts, sounds and lighting, in combination with very few dialogues and conversations, brings about an eerie atmosphere. This is not exactly the peaceful and jolly French countryside as shown in the average travel magazine one would take a glance at! Grandieux makes it look like a hideous, dark place, which (to my mind) suggest the acts of the main character are in some way influenced by that atmosphere. The strongest point of this movie, is the absence of any moral content. ´Why´ is not a question that Grandieux has tried to bring across to the viewers. It is precisely this lack of moral content that frightens some spectators. I can imagine that. However, they cannot deny that it is a very original film. In spite of the fact that the ´serial murderer theme´ can be found in many movies, the approach to this theme is completely different in this film. This is definitely a film which I will remember! I think people will either love it or hate it -I suppose the majority of people will be ´haters´-, actually I am surprised it made some Dutch cinemas. I recommend this film to anyone who likes original, non conventional movies. Give it a try. If you hate it: a VCR has an eject button.

unforgettable flying ribbon of film

[filmvirus · 27 November 2000]

A miracle that film like this has screened for 2 shows in Bangkok Film Festival. After watching this film nothing will be the same for me again. I'm a very lazy lazy type to write much of any thing and not a diary-guy type. However this one is an exception and made me write down the detailed film synopsis all night. I don't wish to say more apart from the fact that anybody who can catch this film in the theatre, please don't miss it. You have to watch it in the theatre- otherwise no video transfer could help you to see much of anything, because most of the time the film was (intentionally)underlit.Call it charming ,weird,poetic,mad ,unforgettable or pretentious, but can you really forget it ? Wherever you are Pierre Grandrieux , I won't miss your second film.

Pointless movie probably the works I've ever seen

[Fnord233 · 1 August 2002]

The only good element that stands out of this unviewable mess of images (I would never imagine calling this "thing" a movie) is first 2 minutes and music (at least in some parts). The rest is pretentious, crappy, pointless story in which the director tries to convince the audience of his originality using distorted, dialogue-less sequences, disturbing music, feeding on people's emotions. But what for? What is the message here? I've seen numerous artsy works, some of them good some quite bad, but nothing like "Sombre". AVOID AT ALL COSTS!! If you want to see a real shocker, reaching the depths of today's 'emotional' hell go for "Hundstage" (Dog Days) by Austrian Director Ulrich Seidl. Michael Haeneke and Werner Herzog praise this movie. And I fully agree with them. And remember do not waste your precious time for crap like SOMBRE. .F.