User Reviews

This is the sort of art house movie that gives art house movies a bad name. The film is about stalking and all the scenes are filmed as if from security cameras. Some shots are split screen, some are complete with time of shooting, some are desperately fuzzy, etc. The two actors, a man and a woman are shot separately - I think the man is in Germany and the woman in London but to make sure I would have to watch it again and I am certainly not going to do that. All they do is wander around streets and through buildings and stare off into space. There is no interaction between the two and all dialogue or more properly the two monologues are voice over. The man appears to be writing a book about being stalked by the woman, there are, at times, even typing noises on the sound track. The woman gives a kind of stream of consciousness rant about being betrayed. All in all it is very much like an film made by an undergraduate trying desperately to be original except that it's about 10 times longer and watching it seems like 100 times longer. I am not sure that you can write a spoiler for a movie like this because nothing happens but in case someone thinks it does contain a spoiler I apologise.

The always-interesting Chris Petit here provides a complex meditation on the nature of human emotions in an age where individual experience has become so fragmented and mediated by so-called "communications" technologies that concepts like love and desire become turned inwards and resolve into anger when possession of the object is thwarted. Using various forms of video surveillance to observe the figures involved, Petit presents a disorienting, fragmented visual surface which reflects the dissolving of any sense of identity. This is not a narrative film, but something akin to the great essay films of Chris Marker -- strange, allusive and elusive, and more deeply rewarding each time you return to it. 10/10

I watched this documentary yesterday and was pleasantly surprised, watching it with no prior expectations. The theme of the movie - stalking, unrequited love, obsession - held the movie together. Two voices shed light on the subject from different angles, creating two different narratives.

The pictures in the films worked well in dialog with the spoken parts, building on a somehow very down-to-earth way of filming, focusing on details which often pass us by unnoticed. This is of course also fitting for the subject of stalking; the obsession that brings out details about someone's life that would otherwise seem uninteresting or details simply invisible to most of us.

The documentary takes the form of an "essay", a quiet reflection, rather than being a documentary attempting to depict the theme from a sociological or a psychological point of view. All in all, this film was a delight to watch.