The film itself is filled with a joie de vivre about the possibilities of acting, with Lavant expressing an emotional repertoire from wild humor to great sadness.
Viewers who haven’t studied their Neon Genesis DVD box sets in advance will find the plot incomprehensible—Old Testament gibberish mixed with political intrigue at the global defense agency headed by Shinji’s aloof father. But the sentiments are clear: “I guess I want Dad to praise me,” says our wavering hero. And his courtship of Asuka is downright charming.
A masterpiece managed with exquisite patience, the film is slow-moving only in the sense that it doesn’t have to move for anybody; Mizoguchi’s hands and eyes search out every crevice along the eternal landscape, granting his characters clemency, or breaking their legs, based on the roll of an infinite-sided die.
Even though she never loses her focus on Nadia, Bombach subtly shifts her attention from Nadia’s specific requests from the international community to the thornier question of what happens to the Yazidis from here onward.
The director purposefully pulls us this way and that, weaving cinematic spells and then yanking us out of them; as viewers, we are both inside and outside the story.
More times than I could count I had no idea what the hell was happening, and also just didn’t care that I didn’t know. Let the Corpses Tan is that strange and beautiful.
Like many gothic tales, The Little Stranger hangs tantalizingly between genres: It has elements of haunted house thriller, of doomed romance, of psychological thriller, of historical allegory.
