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"Code Blue is the film to which I have had the strongest negative reaction of any film I've seen at the festival so far," blogs Barbara Scharres for the Chicago Sun-Times, "but I wasn't alone in that. There were walkouts throughout, but about ten minutes from the end, a large part of the audience simply decided that they'd had enough and started streaming out. I've never seen anything to match it at Cannes. So many people were leaving that the guards had to prop open the exit doors although the film wasn't over…. I ponder what life experience, if any, this film came out of."

"An oddly translated notice posted outside Cannes Directors' Fortnight screenings of Code Blue warns that the film may 'hurt audience's feelings.'" David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter: "But while the final scenes erupt into explicit sex and ugly violence (or ugly sex and explicit...

The film that cautioned audiences it may hurt their feelings did exactly that, the visceral finale of Urszula Antoniak's Code Blue sending members of the debut audience scurrying for the exits in droves as the final burst of violence and degradation played out on screen. The reaction was clearly expected, at least to a degree, the big question is why some chose to exit early. Were they offended by the film's graphic use of hot-button issues - euthanasia, rape and suicide all factor in - or, equally possible, had they simply reached their limit for what is surely one of the bleakest portrayals of human need ever put on screen?Bien de Moor is Marian, a woman on the far side of middle age living...