Sunday, November 18, 2018

Two Paragraph Review: Sorry to Bother You (2018)

You can’t deny that this movie is different and it does not take too long for it to drive this point home. In the alternative world of ultra-capitalism, Cash, the main character, played by ever-more relevant and popular Lakeith Stanfield, just tries to get by. However, this soon brings him to a company working on the process that would eventually change entire humanity and not for the better. With this plot, Sorry to Bother You moves between a grotesque social drama and a weird dark comedy.

The cast and the acting continue to be uneven throughout the film, making it hard to gauge who is what type of person and what do they actually want. I’m not sure if this is intentional or a strange by-product of so many things being odd, but for me, it made the film something that failed to engage. The grotesque nature of the world reverberates with the characters, including Cash, so why empathize with anyone - maybe all that is strange to me as a viewer is normal to the inhabitants of the alternate world - it’s all make-believe inside of a bigger make-believe. The critique of the real-life greed as a driver is plain and called for, but the space in which it was delivered simply did not manage to impress me on any level.