It’s a strange feeling to be among the earliest audiences — and who can tell just how many more such a disturbing, hard-sell film will reach — for a project destined for notoriety. But then Sandra Wollner’s “The Trouble With Being Born” inspires nothing but strange feelings, from unnerving horror to shocked admiration to visceral disgust to that specific type of disorienting nausea that comes from the fractional delay between your eye processing a well-composed image, and your brain comprehending the implications of the actions so coolly depicted.
That gap is just one of the many conceptual fissures into which Wollner’s desperately creepy, queasy, thought-provoking film gnaws: image vs. implication; human vs. non-human; real vs. unreal. If “The Trouble With Being Born” lives anywhere, it is in a house in a forest on the deepest, most sunless lower slopes of the uncanny valley.
Indecipherable, abstract, staticky images flicker and jiggle,...
That gap is just one of the many conceptual fissures into which Wollner’s desperately creepy, queasy, thought-provoking film gnaws: image vs. implication; human vs. non-human; real vs. unreal. If “The Trouble With Being Born” lives anywhere, it is in a house in a forest on the deepest, most sunless lower slopes of the uncanny valley.
Indecipherable, abstract, staticky images flicker and jiggle,...
- 3/1/2020
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
At first glance Elli appears to be a normal young girl living with her single father, spending idle afternoons lazing by a sunlit pool. But a disturbing reality is soon revealed: Elli is actually an android whose memories were programmed by the man she lovingly calls “Daddy.” Before long the true nature of their relationship becomes apparent, until the night Elli sets off to follow a ghostly echo into the woods.
“The Trouble With Being Born” is the unsettling second feature from Austrian director Susan Wollner, who won the German Film Critics’ Award in 2019 for “The Impossible Picture.” An eerie, metaphysical exploration of the identities we create for ourselves, and how they can come unraveled, pic plays in the Encounters section of the Berlin Film Festival.
Wollner spoke to Variety the morning after the world premiere about the isolation of living in a world that’s growing increasingly virtual. She...
“The Trouble With Being Born” is the unsettling second feature from Austrian director Susan Wollner, who won the German Film Critics’ Award in 2019 for “The Impossible Picture.” An eerie, metaphysical exploration of the identities we create for ourselves, and how they can come unraveled, pic plays in the Encounters section of the Berlin Film Festival.
Wollner spoke to Variety the morning after the world premiere about the isolation of living in a world that’s growing increasingly virtual. She...
- 2/26/2020
- by Christopher Vourlias
- Variety Film + TV
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