So I’d heard that this was supposed to be an interesting arthouse horror movie, but I guess I didn’t appreciate quite how arthouse it was. “What if Jeanne Dielman, only not so fast-paced and full of things happening. What if Mirror, only the narrative through-line is less clear.”

I’ll be honest: I didn’t love it. It kind of had a sense of dread, but mostly it had a sense of trying to tell what the fuck was going on. I’m not sure how much of this I can blame on Shudder (whose compression really interacted poorly with the heavy-grain look of the movie to make a visual mess of it), and how much is just the thing itself (the kids talking were basically completely incomprehensible to me — I had to keep asking my wife what they’d just said; at first, when the movie started, I thought they were supposed to be incomprehensible and they were just setting a mood before the movie got to its normal part, oops); but either way, it’s a lot of desperately looking/listening to try to make any sense of anything, and mostly failing. This is definitely a movie where you need to read the Wikipedia article afterward to figure out what you just watched.

If you want to know whether you should watch it yourself, watch the trailer, and then realize that you’ve now seen about 50% of the action in the movie and it goes on for another hour forty, and make your call. For my part, I think there are worse ways to spend a few hours, but it’s not something I’d go out of my way to watch.

Also the absolute scariest part of the movie is when I came down to the living room after having gone off to read the Wikipedia article, and I’m like “apparently this is named after some kind of children’s song that I’ve never heard of?” and my wife, sitting in a dark room lit only by the TV, stared me dead in the eyes and started singing this song complete with hand motions. Absolute nightmare fuel.