Director: Patrick Ridremont
Year: 2021
Country: France/Belgium
Alternate Titles: La calendrier
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
Struggling to adapt to her paraplegic lifestyle, a wheelchair-bound woman receives a strange advent calendar from a friend for her birthday and begins opening the presents inside, but as the holidays continue she finds herself forced to play a deadly game until all the contents are used up.
Review:
Overall, this was a rather fun genre outing. Among the better aspects of this one is the film making such a priority about her condition that there’s a grand build-up throughout here involving that. Since the film not only makes the point clear with her work and home-life struggling because of her status and recent injury, either through the snarky comments and resentments towards the preferential treatment she receives at her work to the -social anxiety towards being around others because she’s in a wheelchair, the first half to this one comes off rather nicely towards making that just as important to the terror brought about by the titular object which is connected together quite well.
Those aspects with the after-effects of the calendar’s powers coming to fruition are incredibly fun and intriguing. With the spirit in control of the punishments being an impressively chilling and creepy design that’s looking for trouble from the very start, it sets off the series of accidents and supernatural occurrences that are rather fun. Taking more of a psychological route that relies on the impending doom that will require her to perform far more dangerous and uncomfortable tactics to keep the calendar from claiming her, the fact that this makes it obvious what has to happen to those around her makes the film far tenser than it should be.
However, there are still some rather fun and chilling setpieces on display that help move this one along. The initial attack on the rapists’ car causes some enjoyable visuals, much like the attack on the boyfriend at the park when he ends up encountering the demonic figure attempting to dispose of the calendar which is a great confrontation involving her being psychically linked to the spirit while she's off at the gym at the same time. The later it goes on and she finds herself being forced to either kill her friends or watch them suffer, the scares, and action ratchet up considerably which also results in a lot of fun confrontations. Added together with a lot more emotional turmoil than expected at the end, these aspects give this one a lot to like.
There are some issues with the film that does hold this one back. The biggest detriment is the frustrating date-switching that makes it nearly impossible to figure out where we are. Since it comes into her possession on the third day and requires her to backtrack to remain up-to-date, it's all very confusing how it works especially with the later discovery that there's been skipped days in the timeline even though everything has been accounted for. That also brings up the other issue in that spelling out these time variations also causes the film to run on a bit longer than necessary with several excess storylines here figuring out the different aspects of this one. Otherwise, there's not a lot wrong here.
Overview: ***.5/5
Quite fun for what it is, there are a few minor issues here that drag this one down somewhat from the majority of the positives here which make this one quite watchable. This one is mostly for those who are intrigued by the premise, are a huge fan of holiday-set genre efforts or appreciate the style and approach it takes, while viewers who are turned off by any of these factors might want to heed caution.
Comments
Post a Comment