Braid

Petula and Tilda, two small time drug dealers, go on the run and decide to stop off at the isolated estate of their childhood friend, Daphne. Daphne's seclusion has turned her into a dangerous psychotic who insists on playing childish games all day long and, if Petula and Tilda don't want to get caught, they'll have to play along.

More of an exercise in style and shock over substance, Braid is a daring and often confounding indie horror/thriller. Madeline Brewer steals the entire film as Daphne, finding just the right balance between terror, camp, and pathos. It's an excellent performance and Braid is worth seeing for that alone.

The cinematography is gorgeous and the filmmakers use the crumbling mansion location to great effect. Pacing never drags much either which is surprising given that the majority of the film is a chamber piece between three characters and it's mostly confined to one location. In that sense, it feels much more like some long lost regional horror relic from the 70's, using whatever it has available to tell its story.

The script could stand to be tighter and it leaves us with maybe a few too many unanswered questions, but the experience of Braid as a whole is well worth your time.

I watched this at home on DVD from my public library. I first read several user reviews and they are scattered all over the place so the only way to know for sure was to see it.

The summary on its IMdb page pretty well summarizes it, "Two wanted women decide to rob their wealthy psychotic friend who lives in the fantasy world they created as children; to take the money they have to take part in a deadly perverse game of make believe."

The two "wanted" friends were dealing drugs, lost about $80,000 worth in a police raid and now they are on the run. Both from the cops and from their drug supplier.

I see the writer/director is Italian, maybe that partly explains why it is so unusual, the relationships, the dreamlike aspect of some scenes. Frankly I didn't find it to be a very good movie, I was never invested in the characters and what they were doing didn't make a lot of sense. I'm glad I watched it, I enjoy seeing experimental movies here and there, but my opinion is most viewers will NOT find it a rewarding experience.

Or is it just a weird good night story? Whatever you make of this, you can't really pin point what it is. At least not as fast as with other movies. To call this weird would be an understatement. If you don't embrace that, you won't have a good time at all watching the movie.

Characters are strange, actions are most often than not unrelatable. Or at least hard to comprehend. Why would that person do this and the other person do that? Shouldn't they be reasonable? If that is what you are thinking (which is perfectly ok or even normal), the movie will annoy you. At least if you keep up the questions and don't just let go. It took me a minute or two myself, but after that I just went with the flow and enjoyed this a lot

It started looking promising - arty, sinister, some good interesting visual stuff, but then it just got too messy trying to be too clever, and I lost interest. By the end it had bounced about that much with reality versus mental health that I didn't really care what was real and what was not and what any of it was about or what happened to anyone. It was just too silly. Acting was pretty mediocre, working with a really thin plot and direction.

This is my second viewing of the film. I will simply say that there are a mountain of highly negative reviews here, which inspired me to comment. If "Braid" (now titled as "Dying to Play") ain't your cup of brew, so be it. Feel free to dislike it. But to simply say "it made no sense" or to point out multiple plot holes is to lazily ignore what is going on.

A single example: what might appear to be bad film-making (a bloody, scarred knee appearing in the next frame as totally healed), is in service of the larger purpose at work here: the blurring of reality, role-playing and the consequences of resigning oneself to a world of fantasy.

As for the "point" of this film: This really is a movie where the camera controls the plot. The jumpy, cinematic shots control the text, and do so in a manner that is much more careful than its seemingly haphazard style would suggest. After all, this is on its face a movie about a game that three girls created as children- here, repeated as adults. The point, then, concerns the creation of a fantasy world (whether through drugs, the Game, acting, wealth etc.) and the repetition and phantasmagoric dysfunction that this bubble world of safety ends up creating. Put another way, the Fellini, Lynch, Argento touches serve a narrative that is purposefully disjointed and fragmented: each of the primary characters plays "the Game;" but only one of them really attempts to make it out . . . Again and again in almost circular fashion.

While this movie certainly has its flaws, it is quite ambitious. I do think it is the sort of film that fares better on a second viewing.