When you watch a film like Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022), what do you actually see ? You see a father and daughter on a budget holiday in the early 2000s. You see a karaoke machine. You see a rug. But the unseen is a suicide note being written in real time across the space-time continuum.
Indie cinema looks at the edges.
Writing about ambiguity is hard. It requires vulnerability. It requires the critic to admit, "I don't know exactly what happened in that final shot, but I felt the floor drop out of my stomach."
Most mainstream reviews are plot summaries dressed up with adjectives. A review of an independent film, however, requires a different muscle. It requires the critic to act as a medium between the viewer and the void.
But then, there is the other cinema. The independent film. The micro-budget oddity. The foreign language film that drifted in on a festival current and disappeared.
When you watch a film like Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022), what do you actually see ? You see a father and daughter on a budget holiday in the early 2000s. You see a karaoke machine. You see a rug. But the unseen is a suicide note being written in real time across the space-time continuum.
Indie cinema looks at the edges.
Writing about ambiguity is hard. It requires vulnerability. It requires the critic to admit, "I don't know exactly what happened in that final shot, but I felt the floor drop out of my stomach."
Most mainstream reviews are plot summaries dressed up with adjectives. A review of an independent film, however, requires a different muscle. It requires the critic to act as a medium between the viewer and the void.
But then, there is the other cinema. The independent film. The micro-budget oddity. The foreign language film that drifted in on a festival current and disappeared.
