The wildly varying reactions to this film in the few reviews already posted here seem to confirm one thing: it's why they make both chocolate AND vanilla. But I have to align myself firmly on the side of the positive postings. Three days after seeing it, I can still see many of the film's images very clearly -- and I'm already confident it's a film I'll be seeing again.
I was consistently intrigued by the world that Veninger, Granofsky & company created, and was impressed by how they managed in almost every case to turn low-budget necessities into creative virtues. I actually enjoyed the fact that we only heard about the "ice mines" and never saw them; and that we only caught glimpses of a futuristic city that didn't seem like a very nice place to visit, let alone live in.
While I still have a few unanswered questions I wouldn't have minded being clearer on, overall I found it strangely refreshing that I WASN'T being shown or told everything about this ironic, anachronistic future -- or that bizarre house, strangely suspended in both time and space -- but just enough to keep me wanting to see how the characters within it would fare. It's a kind of minimalist sci-fi that stays with you, sometimes long after the 50-million dollar CGI effects have faded from memory.
In some ways it reminded me of how I feel watching (or just thinking about) certain episodes of Rod Serling's original Twilight Zone series, and as Martha Stewart used to say, "That's a good thing".
