Saw this at the Sydney Film Festival last week: missed out on a full session at Event, George Street and just got into a second packed screening in Cremorne. The audience laughed (yes, laughed) constantly throughout and gave the film a solid round of applause at the end (a rare event in my experience). What looked on paper like a 140-minute high-conceit skewering of artistic pretension ended up as a delightful comedy of modern manners with little overt political agenda. The fact that most of the plot lines are left unresolved would normally confound an audience, but even this ends up feeling natural. There are a couple of spectacular camera moves (the "Vertigo"reference in particular) and the poster set-piece with the "ape" is, for my money, even more tense and thrilling than the avalanche sequence from the same director's "Force Majeure" (which some critics are calling superior, but I beg to differ). As with "The Lives of Others" I came out of this one knowing I was present at the birth of a classic.
Review of The Square
