Speak No Evil
Starts well but soon unravels into the unrealistic and unrelateable as the discomfort is laid on too thick and unevenly. Culminating in a level of filmmaking incompetence.
I'm not a particularly assertive person and usually grimace through most awkward social interactions and conversational crudity but when it comes to the safety of your kids, drunk driving, physically abusive behaviours, there is a base level of expectation that I have as a human. For the characters to not baulk under such a weight is to jettison all relateability. Any empathy is killed and the sympathy is non existent.
It also kind of reads as a reactionary rebuking of a certain kind of political correctness and effete liberal politeness. It feels like the film is suggesting that if only we were to indulge our irrational feelings about strangers, the unemployed, the browns a little more then we would be in a better place, as if manners and human decency are an impediment to addressing frog boiling red flags. Perhaps the snowflakes were on watch and they've gone and dragged in this massive wooden horse (geddit, Trojan wars, Greek literary reference).
Ostlund and Haneke cover similar ideas regarding the skewering of social acceptability and the paralysis of politeness, but do so in a more relatable and insightful way, which in turn makes the scenarios more discomforting. Lynch's peaks behind the white pickets are far more outlandish but infinitely more believable. Hooper's Chainsaw Massacre for all its excess is less gratuitous and more responsible.
Not forgetting the Thucydidean quote about brutal and short existences outside the system, or was that Nico?
It's pretentious as hell and I expect many will think it's making some insightful political statement, going on to misattribute Milgram, Stamford and Arendt, but it's actually just a rather shit film all in all.