The Distances

Four friends from Spain travel to Berlin to surprise a friend on his birthday. Things don't go well and tensions are revealed. This tedious movie has nothing new to say about anything and does so with a minimum of humor or interest. The movie is done by hand-held camera. The camera jerks constantly, even when focused on a character who isn't moving. I suppose this is meant to convey tension but for me it simply increased my boredom and annoyance and I found myself looking away it times. I don't speak Spanish, so looking away meant missing the captions, yet I didn't get the sense that I missed anything because each scene dragged on and on to make its point. One further annoyance: when the Spanish-speaking characters encountered German speakers, the captions stop. This is a pretty common practice. Problem is, some of the actors' accents are so thick that their English is unintelligible. This wasn't too great a loss because no one was saying anything very interesting anyway.