I generally stay away from reviewing movies people I know have made, with a few exceptions of course. Why? Because sometimes you’ve just watched a movie you hate and now you feel obliged to both be honest to the audience and still be kind to your friends. So it’s a double edge and most of the times I just watch the movie and then ignore to write a review of it, because sometimes it’s better to be quiet. Faust 2.0, or Killer App as it once was called, involves a lot of people I know - so it took a couple of months for me to actually watch it, because I knew I had to write a review of it anyway. A typical First World problem ;)
The Devil (voiced by legendary Swedish actor Per Ragnar) have come up with a good way to infect our souls with his evilness and that’s through apps. And this is the story of five of those apps, and the poor people who took the fateful decision to download them.
First out is Robert Selin’s Bad News. A young woman, the daughter of a famous journalist, have scored one of her first jobs - as a journalist. She’s gonna work the night shift and this during a time when a nasty serial killer is roaming the streets of Stockholm. But her boss gives her an app that will help her in her research. It uses amalgamated technology and she can see stuff that no one else can see, but what is really going on? Will the things she see lead her to the killer, or is there something more sinister going on? Bad News isn’t bad at all, no pun intended, it’s a stylish and maybe a bit too abstract in it’s storytelling and the acting is very, very stiff. But I like it and it triggers that famous imagination in my mind, I wanted to see more, I want to know more.
The next story is Johannes Pinter’s InspirAPPtion and it tells the story of a horror writer with a writer’s block. His agent (or what the hell it is) gives him an advice, write or he’s fucked. And boy, in that moment an ad pops up on his phone, an app for creative people. It will help him to construct a story just by adding a couple of key words to the system. He does that and seconds later a woman runs up to his house and asks for help, and then shit hits the fan! It’s a great idea, but it’s an underwhelming episode. It also feels a bit sloppy and not especially thought-through. It never dares to go all the way, and in the end you just wonder how the fuck that app could inspired anyone to anything?!
The man behind this anthology project is Nicolas Debot, who’s also a well-known distributor here in Sweden. In his story, See Alice, we meet a man sitting in an hotel room - feeling a bit horny, so he uses an app to connect with a young and hot woman who shows up at his door faster than he could expect. She brings him to a club, The Hellfire Club, and then things starts to go wrong. I know Debot’s fascination for nudity and this one is packed with flesh, and the obligatory dick-shot, and I like it. Not just the dick-shot, but the atmosphere of the story. The twist isn’t that strong or far out, but the story works. But hey, that guy playing the lead is not especially good. Which is what drags it down a bit.
Moral Call is an interesting episode, directed by Allan Gustafsson. It’s set in the corporate world of a weapon manufacturer. When the news hit that the company have sold weapons to countries who uses it to deliberately kill innocent citizens an app shows up, starting to affect those using it, bringing the victims into their own lives. This is the best part, and with some really fine acting by Katharina Bothén and Per Burell. It feels big and serious and uses Stockholm in a great way. The ending is abrupt and it takes a few moments to realize what happened, but I think Gustafsson handled it very well. A surprisingly political episode...which leads us to the next...
In The Discreet Charm of the Internet Troll, Micke Engström creates an uneven but still quite effective showdown with the internet trolls of Sweden. A woman starts seeing things when connecting to an app, a demon or some kind starts telling her, inspiring her to do stuff, write stuff and at the same time she’s mourning her husband who dumped her. But things starts to get out of hand and it doesn’t end well. I’m not totally sure, but I think what we have here is a wonderfully brutal diss of Sverigedemokraterna, the Swedish neo-nazi party (neo-liberals refuse to call them that, but even if you put makeup on a pig it’s still pig). So even if it’s a bit all over the place, it dares to spark some controversy. Me like.
Faust 2.0 was good. It’s not the best anthology movie I’ve seen, but it’s far more ambitious than some of the other reviews I’ve read claims it to be. It’s quite far from the comic book style the American anthologies often brings up. And for you who’s curious of Sweden it’s a pretty good way to at least see how Stockholm looks during the night ;)
Faust 2.0 is out on DVD and blu-ray here in Sweden, with English subs and a reversible cover in the same language.
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