Style without content

Amer (2009)

I wanted to see this movie after I saw the trailer which really blew me away. It looked like a perfect homage to giallos and turned out the style of the movie surely was. So the movie looks and sounds brilliant and there is that great giallo mood to it, but to be honest I didn't get the movie. The story is divided into three parts each focusing on a moment in a woman's life. The first part where the woman is a young girl is like a surreal ghost story and this actually is the best part of the film. It's truly scary at parts and it's done in the good old way of suspension building and not cheap scares. Already at this point I had no idea what's going on in the "plot". Second part focuses on her finding her sexuality, at least I guess so as that's how I interpreted it. On the third part the woman returns to her childhood home and gets stalked by a man with a knife. As a whole I'm kind of disappointed at the movie, was expecting an intriguing "whodunnit", but got some nonsense surrealistic art. Sure the style is great and the mood is brilliant most of the time and the soundtrack is awesome and it's well made, but the story is completely missing. I know most giallos have a very bad story and that's not the main thing about them, but at least they have something that glues the art together, this one doesn't so it tends to get quite tedious after a while. And since there's no reward in the end you are left with only one question, why? Why do a brilliant looking and sounding movie without any story? Anyway I didn't get bored watching it, but left me with a bit of a disappointed feeling in the end.
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