Letterboxd — Your life in film

For the first 30 minutes I had no clue what was going on. Not sure anyone did. Then at one point I became frustrated. Carruth wasn't throwing any bones at all, and he must know that people are going to try to make sense of what they are seeing, but there was no sense to be had. That turned to anger. Why do film-makers think their own little game of playing hide and seek is worthy of being put to film? You've got to be something arrogant and then some to commit something like that to celluloid just to fuck with people's minds. It's like learning a foreign alphabet when the table of letters has been lost for centuries. Arrogant, silly, the 'joke is on us' type of thing.

Then it happened. We were thrown a bone. A small one, but a bone nonetheless. Something to chew on for a while. Something to give some small hint of direction. And then we got another small one and we could at least formulate questions that we couldn't before.

By the end of it I was secure enough in the film to be able to ask questions, something I feared wouldn't happen.

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And now I want to punch myself in the gut because those were some notes I wrote immediately after viewing and I never did get around to writing a complete review. So I have no clue what those questions were. None. Hell, I can't even remember the film. Seriously. I can't recall a single thing about this film. I'm sure if I looked up a synopsis somewhere it might trigger at least a few visuals, but without that I am at a complete loss. And that raises a completely different question. I don't know which direction I was going to take in that last paragraph, but if I can't recall a single thing about a film I saw less than 10 days ago, I really have to ask myself: If a film is that elusive that I have nothing to hold on to 10 days later, can it be any good? To which I would answer: Of course it can. It could be one of those films you have to experience. A film's value doesn't necessarily equal remembering it (geez, I remember Benji and I saw that when I was 9, and it doesn't make it a masterpiece). But there must still be something about not remembering a single thing... I don't know. I'm all for experiencing something and the immediacy of it all, but to not remember a single visual?

All to say I left the film thinking about something that I don't remember but wanting to rate it 3-1/2 to 4 stars, even though I struggled with it in the first 30 minutes or so. But now that I remember absolutely nothing, I'm not sure what to do. Perhaps I will just leave it unrated. Seems the most reasonable thing. Or perhaps I will go my memory of what I was going to give. That seems reasonable. too.