Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

Lu2.5

Es hätte ruhig alles absurder werden können idk where’s your FREAK

Louis F

Typa movie den wo jemand guckt und dann sagt ja da geht's um Familie und die Beziehung zwischen denen

Frederik

What starts out as a rather stilted "Imagine if the Safdies directed Knives Out" quickly turns into one of the strangest things I've seen in a theater this year, which feels odd to say, because it really shouldn't be all that strange. Perhaps the effect stems from how completely unreadable I found this to be in terms of quality. Despite it only being pretty inconsistently funny as a dark comedy and only mildly stressful as a piece of anxiety cinema, I was somehow transfixed for the entire overlong runtime. Pretty much every strand of the plot is simultaneously terrible and awesome, particularly the whole shamanism thing, which is a bit that the film commits to so unfathomably hard that, though it isn't really funny, it somehow manages to splash over into several really great sequences, such as the play-acting bit. Kalter Hund goes round and round in circles and yet it never grew tiresome for me, particularly as by the film's ending, the only read that enticed itself to my brain was that this is a total farce about how this privileged family contorts and compartmentalizes its reality into telling itself that it is resolving all these lingering issues without actually doing anything, and how the whole series of non-confrontational confrontations is simply a kind of impromptu initiation ritual for the next generation. It is pretty revealing that once the narrative splits off in different directions, it neatly follows every character's suppressed traumas and emotions and share of the twisted family history, without anyone actually doing any reflecting -- and even the one person who does is roped into the web by the end. I can see why people are bouncing off this film; if you're not willing to be in on the joke (that isn't even a real joke) then the runtime must be pretty punishing. I have no idea if this is good or bad or what. Unexpectedly, it is in fact one of the strangest things I've caught in theaters this year, and the weird enjoyment I gathered from it is reason enough for me to think I kind of loved it. It only gets funnier the more I think about it.