 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: Interchange • Year: 2016 • Country: Malaysia • Director: Dain Said • Main cast: Prisia Nasution, Iedil Putra, Shaheizy Sam, Nicholas Saputra • Runtime: 102 minutes • Production company: Apparat, Sonneratia Capital • TRAILER |
I like the diversity of cinema you can find in a festival like Sitges. Even if it’s a genre one, ‘Fantastic’ leaves room for a lot of nuances, and you can find intriguing thrillers mixtures of horror, supernatural and ancient magic beliefs, all in one. Unfortunately, this one is not a good example.
Interchange (2016) is a film directed by the malaysian Dain Said, who after being known at the Tiff Festival with Bunohan: Return to Murder back in 2011 (film that was presented as the Malaysia’s official submission for the Best Foreign Language film in the Academy Awards 2012), returned this year with his new film, and made it to Tiff, Sitges, and Locarno, having it’s world premiere at the Piazza Grande. The synopsis is very attractive: a ‘supernatural noir’, a forensic photographer that has to solve a series of macabre murders in a city that conceals shamans, magic superstitions and supernatural beings. Nevertheless, I don’t share the same enthusiasm after having watched the movie.
The intentions may have been good ones, and even the resources of the movie (it’s not a low budget production) manifest itself in the photography and some of the scenarios. But it doesn’t start with the right foot, and still gets worse with a terrible slow rhythm, a lot of music that doesn’t accompany the images at all, and a lot of pretensions that do not awake the interest of the spectator. It could be a grotesque mysterious thriller, it has some powerful images, but it terribly fails while leading us there. I think that’s the main problem: it’s not well guided, and I don’t think it’s a matter of asian storytelling, because there’s been a great variety of good asian movies at least in Sitges this year. But I certainly couldn’t connect with it, and I wasn’t the only one disappointed.
I was surprised that in the movie they were speaking indistinctly Malay and English. At first I though that was really strange, even unnatural (certainly didn’t help me in appreciating the screening), but after looking it up, in Malaysia most people study English as a second language. Not only it’s widely spoken, but even in some fields or certain official contexts it may be the official working language. Even if I was wrong, to change repeatedly in the middle of a phrase from one language to the other doesn’t contribute to a solid general atmosphere (or that’s at least my opinion).
My recommendation: try his previous film (which I haven’t watched yet) or go for another asian thriller, any other will have better chances than this one.
RATE: 3/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5885886
