Maniac Killer 

A quiet film that does not demand your tears but earns them. It explores love that lingers, timing that fails, and the silence between what was and what could have been.

For those tranquil houses with white fences, what is happening behind every closed door?

The film is a simple love story reminiscent of stories like The Notebook released in 2004. Sylvie and Robert are rarely actually together in the film, however; time and circumstance keep them away from each other, and the audience waits with bated breath to see them find one another over and over.

It took writers D.B Weiss and David Benioff two years to give us a promising final season. Two. Years. It was just going to be six episodes, which was short considering that all the other seasons — except season 7 — were 10 episodes. 10. 6 wasn’t enough, and even HBO wanted to give the writers more episodes. More seasons, even. However, the writers wanted to get out of the show as quickly as possible to work on other projects. This abruptness is clearly shown in this season.

These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.

Given a choice between a man and a mountain, it’s safer to choose the mountain.