Amer

Amer was recommended to me by a friend, according to whom I was in for something really unusual. I did get a sense of originality, but it’s a pity that I actually don’t know what or who Amer is, I don’t know what this movie was about and mainly I have no idea what’s the connection between the three parts that this movie consists of. The only link I can see is that this movie is actually no movie at all, but rather a collection of crazy cuts, a couple of original ideas with references to all kinds of things. What I noticed the most was probably the music, which at times reminded me of old French crime movies. Other than that, the first idea of the little girl who can sense everything scary around here was nice, the second part was for pervs and the third part is an homage to giallo movies. I could imagine all three ideas squeezed into an imaginative 15 minutes, which would be about enough for all that originality, but ninety minutes? I don’t know if my initial excitement about this movie was killed by the amount of ideas, or the boredom associated with that… (21/11/2015)

A perfect nod and postmodern mockery of the film genre - this horror-giallo is a tribute to Argento and his essential overcoming: the film is above all clever and its formal aspect is refined to the edge of the best formal mastery, even leaning towards experimental pioneering. The entire de facto silent film is based on the creation of mental associations through visual shortcuts, establishing "short connections" between (contrasting images for the majority of people, not so much for giallo fans...) otherwise contrasting images - death, pleasure, young bodies in the throes of sexuality, wrinkled corpses; (genius!!!) the coquetry of naked skin with synthetic rubber and metal. In short: a constant reversibility of life and death, morbidity and pleasure, achieved through the frenzy of the camera and editing, fetishistic details (substituting for the viewer's touch), and the actual absence of words and a "plot," which forces us to rely on our most lascivious senses sight and touch. This is further proof that films can be told primarily through images! Another question is the reversibility of the victim and the killer, and above all the killer and the viewer, giving birth to perverse film pleasure. (18/06/2015)

An audiovisual spectacle with a beautiful atmosphere in several horror scenes. If it had a detective script, it would be a perfect Giallo, but what to do when Amer is basically NOTHING experimentally stretched to feature length? When, after thirty minutes, I gave up the hope of a plot with continuity and meaning, the film only bored me until the end, regardless of the occasional surprise about how effective some moments are. But the directors expressed themselves artistically, which has made certain group of viewers rejoice at the non-mainstream approach to the genre. Myself, I felt frustrated at how satisfied I could have been if the ambitions of the creators had been appropriate to the horror genre. But that is my problem, not the creators’. (13/02/2011)