Critic Reviews

The pained, textured performances of Sevigny and Malone enrich their scenes, but when it ranges away from its leads, The Wait can seem like an anthology of moments rather than a narrative whole, although those moments do accumulate into a mood of chilly, gently surreal isolation.

The payoff isn’t nearly as interesting as the cryptic set-up and disquieting performances and scenes that precede it in The Wait.

An art film whose seductive qualities don't entirely erase the suspicion that its weirder elements might be empty affectation.

While Blash intends The Wait to be a study in stasis, depicting emotional paralysis in various forms, the thin, amorphous nature of both this film and Lying suggest that he simply doesn’t have much to offer apart from uncontextualized moodiness.

Writer-director M. Blash's sophomore film is ethereal and trippy, told less in scenes than in oblique snatches, not unlike the experience of emotional paralysis. This approach grows wearying.

By the end, audiences will most likely feel as if they've been locked out of the drama that's presumably unfolding right in front of them.

The dialogue is so vague, and the plot so minimal, it all feels like a rather pointless exercise.

It’s all just so much empty eye candy.

Probably best to dissuade the so-bad-it’s-good crowd: There’s nothing here to laugh at with the communal glee of a "Rocky Horror" or "The Room"; only a spectacularly bad composite shot of a fire-fighting plane induces any real giggles.

Ms. Sevigny is not called “the queen of the weirdo Bs” for nothing. (In fairness, she was a weekly television addiction as one of the polygamous Mormon wives on the hit TV series Big Love.) But not since she performed real-time fellatio on scruffy Vincent Gallo in the forgettable 2003 bomb "The Brown Bunny" has she stooped this low.