Sort of brilliant, sort of a mess.

The first third is cinematic greatness... we follow this woman without meaningful dialog or plot, mostly being given heavily edited snippets of her memories and thoughts as we follow her setting up the film. As an 'unknown woman', we don't know who she is, we don't know what she's doing, we're just following her, backdropped by amazing editing and a fantastic Morricone score.

Then in the middle third, it turns into a fairly conventional, even sentimental, mother-child relationship story. Now everything is expository and based on dialog, now everything is in service of the fairly standard plot.

Then it turns into a Hitchcock wannabe suspense boiler! The game builds up, a mysterious evil bald man from her past threatens her, she starts cracking safes, some santa clauses beat her up. This suspense is all very well and almost masterfully done.

Want more? It's also fairly substantially a "message movie" concerning the sex trade and the mistreatment of women, there's some pretty disturbing imagery and implications here. I dunno, I commend films that don't shy away from disturbing the audience... it's just hard to watch. On that note, there's also a LOT of gore here. But gore is more loveable.

In spite of being all over the place, I was ready to call this pretty goddamn great... Until the end. The suspense boiler and chess game builds brilliantly, but let's just say what it leads to doesn't work. We're told what happens in the climax confrontation and then shown the actual scene after... the effect seems ballsy on paper, but I felt cheated and underwhelmed after all that buildup. After that the movie just peters out... 15 minutes explain the loose ends of the plot, the lead gets a "you did this all for nothing! ha!" depressing moment, the sentimental middle third returns. It just feels like a weak, weak way to end the plot that was so brilliantly building towards an explosion.

There's also some questionable scenes in terms of logic... a safe who's combination is three huge numbers that can be easily spotted from a keyhole, a guy getting his gut ripped apart by giant scissors and somehow living so he can punish the lead later in the film... a parapeligic character and subplot that builds up and then totally disappears halfway through the film. Stuff like that.

Forgot to mention, the acting is pretty excellent and the movie if nothing else is always gorgeous and well shot. It's definitely too all over the place for me to call this a masterwork, but it's definitely one of the more ambitious films you'll see this year, if nothing else. I would recommend it.

4/5