Pros- This movie had a lot of things going in its favor. Again, never having seen a silent film, I can only gauge its effectiveness from my inexperienced perspective. I liked the minimalism in subtitles, as it really forced you to pay attention to the film to realize what is going on. They didn't overdo it and spoon-feed you the entire plot, which was nice.
This movie was filmed in Mythoscope, which seems to be a method of recording or editing recent film to make it look antiquated. This was a nice homage to how movies would have been filmed in the 1920s. Surprisingly, I didn't find it as distracting as I thought I would.
Speaking of the whole throwback idea of the film, the acting, "special effects", makeup, and set design all felt very appropriate to the time period. It was very interesting to me to think back to a time when movies were this drastically different. I found myself asking very stupid questions with very obvious answers: "Why did they make silent films in the first place?" or "Why couldn't they just shoot this scene on an island?" were some of the gems I came out with,
I have to give this movie props, as it was likely a very scary story back in its time. It's hard to imagine, though, with the way we currently view and value horror flicks, that this was actually frightening to anyone. I don't want my lack of knowledge of older silent films to cause me to slam this film as "lame" when I have nothing to compare it to, so I will just say that I thought the psychological/dreaming aspect was kind of neat, and felt to me to be the attempted "horror" in the film, as opposed to the monster itself. I liked the ending, and thought it was a good indication that the aforementioned is true.
I liked the score! I'm obviously big on music in movies, and it was so fun to see music actually shaping and assisting with the story, as opposed to just being present for ominous parts, or foreshadowing.
Lastly, no loopholes! The one error I thought I caught (the lead character reading English text from a Swiss man's journal) was cleared up as the journal entrant did not want his wife to read it, so he chose to write in English to keep it a secret from her. Well played. indeed.
Cons- In the beginning of the movie, the time period and perspective changed three or four times, and it was hard to keep up with. Without modern luxuries like color and sound, those transitions weren't as seamless as they obviously would be today, which caused some brief confusion at times.
Disregarding nuances that were clearly meant to be time-period relevant, I didn't find a lot of cons in this. I didn't think the monster was super scary, and I thought they could have done more with less actual shots of it and more shadow shots. A minor complaint, though, given the point of the film.
Wrap up- I didn't actually enjoy this film as much as I might've enjoyed others, but in retrospect I really think it did a solid job of telling the story in the desired fashion. It's not a type of film I'm probably ever going to love, or seek out, but I'm really glad I got the opportunity to watch and review a silent horror.
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