- Sensibility: The mother's emotional state acts as the primary justification for all of the chaos that ensues throughout the film. The film is tragically sensible, even with the time skips.
- Cinematography: Excellent sound design, particularly around the baby monitor and the ocean. Costuming, hair, and makeup are all excellent and help magnify the emotional states of the mother tremendously. Some repetition around some void imagery feels a bit derivative, but otherwise excellent imagery and framing throughout.
- Energy: Gripping in a horrifying way. The film is relentless, like the mother's perception of her life.
- Narrative: The imagery uses to convey the mother's feeling are brilliant. The hole metaphor is incredibly strong. The dialogue and scene choreography are all brilliant push and pull mechanisms to draw the viewer in for sympathy and push them away with disgust.
- T-Points: The film received four bonus points: one for a moment looking in a broken mirror and calling out to a hole, one for a shot of an overhead light in a motel bathroom, one for a final conversation with a therapist, and one for the ending scene with the ocean.
This film is haunting. I watched it back to back because I was in such a trance after the first watch. Movie of the year so far for me.
Number of Watches: 2
