This review contains spoilers
What a massive improvement over Her Story lol. Playing these back to back (for my horror game podcast The Safe Room) gave me whiplash.
Unfortunately I think this is still pretty tiresome. The first time you encounter "the twist" (several of the people in Immortality are actually two immortal beings simply called The One and The Other One) is legitimately un-nerving and it is slick to move through clips. But it explains itself too much and is too cute by half.
Lot of people have talked about how this critiques the "male gaze" while indulging it, but I don't think that's exactly the problem. A lot of Immortality's horror is found in the kind of woman who has been eaten alive by Hollywood being able to look back at you, being actually the most powerful person in the room. The One is obviously meant to be sympathetic and I understand the move of turning a victimized woman into an ageless vampire. But it's difficult for me to read this in an unparanoid way. The concluding conflict is that The One physically cannot hold themselves as both male auteur and female star. They almost die doing it. Rough!
This may just be a me problem but: The juxtaposition between scenes, individual cuts, is cinema! Having those be algorithmic (on some level anyway) is kind of soul crushing to me. To be clear there are some effective beats in this vein. Though I dislike how expository the hidden talk show scene is, the way it gets more distorted the deeper you get into it very cool. But the construct is so artificial, I wish it would either let itself have some damn shot-reverse-shot or actually lean in further and have takes of the same scene from different angles. It's already work! Do interesting things with that friction instead of trying to rub it away.
That said I will probably be around for whatever Half Mermaid kicks up next. It's better to have things to say than nothing.
Unfortunately I think this is still pretty tiresome. The first time you encounter "the twist" (several of the people in Immortality are actually two immortal beings simply called The One and The Other One) is legitimately un-nerving and it is slick to move through clips. But it explains itself too much and is too cute by half.
Lot of people have talked about how this critiques the "male gaze" while indulging it, but I don't think that's exactly the problem. A lot of Immortality's horror is found in the kind of woman who has been eaten alive by Hollywood being able to look back at you, being actually the most powerful person in the room. The One is obviously meant to be sympathetic and I understand the move of turning a victimized woman into an ageless vampire. But it's difficult for me to read this in an unparanoid way. The concluding conflict is that The One physically cannot hold themselves as both male auteur and female star. They almost die doing it. Rough!
This may just be a me problem but: The juxtaposition between scenes, individual cuts, is cinema! Having those be algorithmic (on some level anyway) is kind of soul crushing to me. To be clear there are some effective beats in this vein. Though I dislike how expository the hidden talk show scene is, the way it gets more distorted the deeper you get into it very cool. But the construct is so artificial, I wish it would either let itself have some damn shot-reverse-shot or actually lean in further and have takes of the same scene from different angles. It's already work! Do interesting things with that friction instead of trying to rub it away.
That said I will probably be around for whatever Half Mermaid kicks up next. It's better to have things to say than nothing.