Look Away (2019)

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Leisher
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Look Away (2019)

Post by Leisher »

A teenage girl is bullied and turns to her mirror image to make things right.

The lead, India Eisley, looks young enough that I felt a bit uncomfortable watching her change clothes in the opening. It got really uncomfortable when she was masturbating. Once they showed her nips I had to pause the movie and hit IMDB for her stats. She was 25 when the movie came out. An important tidbit when you're casting a young looking woman as a high school girl.

Thing is, she's a really attractive girl with no obvious flaws (and she does a full frontal scene). Her father, played by Jason Isaacs, is a respected and well off plastic surgeon. Her mother, played by Mira Sorvino, is hot and seems to have her shit together...aside from her obliviousness to her marriage issues...but appearances can be deceiving. Anyway, the point is, there is NO FUCKING WAY this girl would get bullied. It gets worse as she is physically assaulted at a dance in front of a laughing crowd by a male classmate. Hot rich girls don't get assaulted at a dance in the middle of the floor as people laugh.

Anyway, India Eisley carries this film. She does an amazing job, and genuinely should have won awards for it. In fact, there's really not a bad performance to be found. Just IMDBed India and it turns out she's a Disney/ABC Family star by way of The Secret Life of the American Teenager, which makes sense. A lot of those kids turned adults seem to do a film like this one to show they shouldn't just be type cast as the role they played on a show.

Where the film struggles is behind the camera. The writing isn't super tight. The overall "what the fuck is going on" could genuinely be two different things, and maybe that's the intent, but maybe not? The opening credits make a lot more sense after watching the movie though, which is a flaw because the family status appears to be completely different when the movie begins. Slowly showing us the cracks in the family and this girl's life doesn't work with the story being told. I don't feel like I'm explaining this well. Both the visuals and the story work, but not together...? There's also a bit of a big flaw later in the film with police procedures not being followed, and the fate of one person never being shown or explained. The biggest flaw is a reveal late in the movie that seems to show the film is EXACTLY as shown, which I think would lessen it. Again, hard to explain.

It's also a bit slow, and at 1:43 of runtime, I'm thinking that could have been knocked down to 80-90 minutes.

The filmmakers were going for a really powerful statement piece like Identity or Memento and they just missed. I think they actually let the performers down who all brought their A game.

That being said, I think it's worth a viewing. India's performance alone is worth it.
“Every record been destroyed or falsified, books rewritten, pictures repainted, statues, street building renamed, every date altered. The process is continuing day by day. History stops. Nothing exists except endless present in which the Party is right.”
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