
Stripper Stinna lives in a violent relationship with drug abuse, and her five-year-old daughter is in foster care. One night, she is confronted with the failures and concealments of the past, as a misunderstanding leads to a job in a large mansion. Stinna is first in the throes of her emotions, but before the night is over, she must lower the parades in reconciliation and in recognition that she too has something to rectify.
From its visually stunning opening credits, which show women dancing through a forest to musical rhythms that sound almost primal, to its quiet, heartbreaking final frame, Mona Fastvold’s historical rendering of the Shaker religious movement is an experience that will stay with me for a long time.
What makes the lighting in Casablanca even more impressive is how it reflects the emotional states of the characters without needing explicit dialogue.
In a world where we hear ringers and beepers at every corner, technology feels inescapable. This is why technology is often an enemy in Digital J-horrors, like One Missed Call.
It only seems to prove that when the company had their backs against the wall and needed an all pleasing, generic movie that had to make up for The Last Jedi, they chose to sacrifice almost everything that made their main protagonist interesting and that made her stand out as the strong female character that a generation of young movie goers was supposed to look up to. Instead, we were left with a Rey that was so much less than she could have been. And I guess that’s the real story of Rey and The Rise of Skywalker; they could have been so much more, but they were just more of the same.