Wow! Such a good movie.

Expected more

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Amer may not have a high re-watch value for me, but it certainly was a unique experience. I may have to let it sink in a bit as I'm still a bit confused. Never have I seen a movie where literally everything is sexualized. From crawling spiders to a simple walk to the hairdresser with your mother. Not by methods like nudity but solely by its cinematography. Besides the cinematography, the scenery and actresses are gorgeous if I may say so. The three chapters, each representing a stage of the main character's life worked quite well. The plot's simplicity works in cases like Amer. The It's definitely abstract and there's practically no dialogue. Movies like Amer could go both ways if you're new. I'm happy to say to I quite liked it.

Saw this movie at Frightfest Glasgow.And let me just start by saying oh my good god and holy ghost and mother mary, this is so fantastically boring.Yeah, yeah, before you get your sweats in a wrinkle, I get that it is supposed to be "art", and blah-blah. But that doesn't mean it has to be boring.There is close to no horror here, it is absolutely not a horror movie. There is one scene that is actually pretty creepy, but that's it.No more. No more horror for you! Get out!Really. It is a lot of, uhm, silence, and, I don't even know what to call it. Just, super mellow. People looking through key-holes(?), scarfs blowing in the wind. I don't know. I feel a little douchy, because I'm sure the people who made this are nice hardworking people and I doubt they would call this horror. It should definitely not be shown at a horror movie festival. No, no, no.It should be shown at a can-you-stay-awake-though-this-festival.During the whole movie I hoped for the horror to start. In every scene (feels like about 14 hours long) you wait for something to happen, then no. Just a new scene with nothing cool. I was so happy when this movie was over. That's not what you want from a movie!

Cinema can be a powerful thing to behold. Not only as a means in which to express whatever saga it may desire, but also to provoke feeling and thought in its viewer. Much has been made, certainly in academic terms, of what the audience perceives through cinema, and this unique and astounding Belgian gem conveys this like no other piece of film in a long time. The triptych story, following the life of Ana through her childhood, her coming-of age adolescence, and her eventual becoming as a 'woman, is clearly focused on using cinema as a medium in its purest form. Dialogue is sparse, images are vivid, the editing poignant, not a shot goes by without meaning. As a reference point, we can cite the giallo movement as an immediate connection, yet AMER is so much more than a mere homage. Recalling the great works of Franju, Bava, and Robert Weines' 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari', to name but a few, modern menace and eroticism is also adopted here to startling effect. A lot has been expressed in terms of a lack of narrative as a main cause for concern. For this viewer it is the complete opposite, in that we are made to feel the fear, the sexuality, the loss, of our vulnerable protagonist, not too dissimilar to Jires' Valerie. A film to experience, interact with, rather than simply allow. Enter and take pleasure in the real power of this medium. Unfortunately all too rare in modern cinema.

When I included Amer in a short list of films I was eagerly anticipating in 2010, I wrote that I was looking forward to "ostentatious cameras that go on a discovery of psychosexual nightmares, a stylish violence, jazzy grooves". I'm a big fan of Italian genre cinema, especially gialli, for me they fulfill the needs comic-books do in others. When I say I'm a fan, I mean that when Stelvio Cipriani's song La Polizia Ha Le Mani Legate (originally part of Cipriani's score for Roma Violenta) finished playing in Amer's end credits, I rummaged through my cd collection to find it.But, even as I was writing that a few months ago, Amer already had a reputation as more than a giallo film, "arthouse" people insisted, which intrigued me more. So, does Amer reward the giallo fan with the wink of film reference, or is the giallo only the trope of an expression intended for a different audience? To go back to my appreciation for the giallo as comic book, it's the mentality of the colorful panel that appeals to me, the vivid bits of casual violence to strike a chord and be forgotten after the next page, the indulgence on something that reaches only as deep as the excitement it provides. To put so much effort or go through all the trouble for the pleasure of something momentary, this exaggeration is essentially the province of youth, where the fling of a few days burns with the passion of true love. In this sense, the giallo rejuvenates me.That in mind, Amer is at once an apotheosis and a keelhaul of the panel, an overkill of shots capturing small details, of closeups of eyes or reflections or bits of the human anatomy. It's a world come alive through the senses, by a child overhearing conversations from behind closed doors, or a young girl feeling the first tingling of a booming sexuality in her skin. There's very little dialogue and this appeals to me, because the convoluted plots were always my least favorite aspect of the giallo.But if Amer is not pushed forward by people talking, does it establish other means of communicating this story of sexual awakening and repression, the schism that follows from a child discovering a cruel world or a teenager being denied that discovery on her own? I'll say yes, but with reservations. Still, what's important for me, is the tweaking of the filmed image to see is there another way to make cinema, the nature of an experiment whose results can only be appreciated in the future. Better said, if we peel a cabbage we get the core, but if we peel an onion? Some will say we get nothing, but we've done the peeling and we've transformed the onion, so can we really say that? The cinema of Amer is that peeling.Two things particularly stand out for me here in this cinematic depiction of trauma.One is the root of it, seen through the kaleidoscope of a child's awestruck imagination. A child's feverish nightmare shot in the otherworldly cyans and magentas of Mario Bava, where disfigured old men and strange hooded figures reach out to the camera. This is probably the most horrific part of the movie.The other is the cause and effect of the teenage girl's sexual awakening. The directors explore this with a marvellous sense of exaggeration, of a complete fetishization of sexuality and the human body. When the young girl comes across a group of bikers, we get blurry closeups of chrome, of throats undulating or the trickle of perspiration, of buckles and boots. The girl approaches them almost solemnly, clinging to her short summer dress, with an air of fearful apprehension and the irrepressible instinct of a moth drawn to a flame. Before her discovery can be consumated, her overbearing mother shows up to slap her for the offense and take her away. Simple, crude some may say, but brilliant in getting a point across.It's in the film's conclusion that we find the giallo lurking in the shadows of a ruined mansion, where the black-gloved hand of the killer slashes the dark. The directors give us the killing hand but with a twist, another contraption of the giallo.What about the intended audience though? I feel that Amer will appeal more to fans of the sexual psychodrama of Repulsion, than the fan who will seek out a film like Amuck for the profound pleasure of watching giallo queens Barbara Bouchet and Rosalba Neri make out on the same bed. The lurid tradition of Sergio Martino is only honored in the selection of epochal musis by the likes of Bruno Nicolai, Morricone or Cipriani.