I watched the movie that I mentioned here:
It’s hard to say how I feel about it. There are some really great shots. Lots of visual storytelling without lots of dialogue. It establishes certain motifs, symbols, music, and uses them effectively. Quite well made.
It sets up the exact scenario that is explained in the trailer. The main character is a woman who is a neurosurgeon that lives in New Jersey. She used to be from Hungary, but she’s lived in NJ for many many years. She meets a man at a conference in the US, and falls in love instantly. Coincidence, he’s Hungarian and lives in Budapest. They agree to meet, so she goes to Budapest. He doesn’t show at the appointed place and time. When she finds him, he doesn’t remember her.
The good part about this plot is that the movie effectively keeps the audience guessing. Especially since the setting, and much of the message obviously, revolves around the human mind, you can’t help but come up with all sorts of explanations that aren’t uncommon in movies. Did she imagine it? Is he a completely imagined person? Which scenes are real, and which scenes are in her mind? Is he up to something nefarious? Ghosts come up at one point in the movie, and you start thinking of supernatural explanations.
The part of the movie I don’t like is that a lot of these questions could be simply answered if adults just fucking talked to each other. Just fucking talk and all mysteries will be solved! This is what separates my fav Rear Window, from movies like this. In Rear Window the adults discuss everything, consider evidence, and act within the bounds of some amount of rationality. The audience is in just as much suspense as the characters, and empathize with them.
In Preparations… the characters have likeable aspects, but I didn’t care about them so much. Instead I was mostly just frustrated with their inability to just discuss which each other what was going on so they could figure their shit out. That scenario has been done enough, and in 2021 I don’t think there’s any room to retread that ground ever again.
Attention writers in all mediums. If the core conflicts and mysteries of your story could all be resolved instantly by the characters just talking to each other, throw everything you wrote in the trash and start again.