Pose | Film Review

 

Two couples experience strange occurrences after unknowingly booking a mansion at the same time.

I heard really bad things about this movie. It was essentially snuck onto streaming with no promotion, the reviews were terrible and the premise was way too vague. But it was James McAvoy and another improvised movie, so I was down to see exactly how bad it could be.

And as the reviews suggest, it is a bad one.

This is the second James McAvoy improvised movie I've seen, and the first one wasn't great either but it did have a better plot than this one at least. 

From the opening credits of the film I could already tell how slow it would be. And it remained this slow the entire way through.

But the main issue with this is that it never captures your attention. 

Despite being improvised. which you'd think would make the dialogue feel more authentic, it actually has the opposite effect. You can see the actors trying to come up with something to say next, you can hear the awkward pauses, you can feel them trying to keep the story coherent, and none of it works. It really could have done with at least some sort of script.

But in addition to that, none of the characters are particularly interesting to watch. I didn't really understand the point of any of them.

That being said, the actors were great, with McAvoy being outstanding as always. But the good acting really doesn't help the story. Nothing makes sense and we don't care about these people. Even if we were watching Oscar-worthy performances, it wouldn't make the film good.

The only thing that made me sit through the film rather than turning it off (which I was very tempted to do) was the short runtime at 1hr 17 minutes. If the film had been even 5 minutes longer I would have turned it off halfway through.

Some of the editing choices were really odd, and made things feel even more stilted and awkward than they already were.

Overall, this film felt like a waste of time. Thankfully it was short enough that there was time to watch another film after, because this definitely isn't one I'd recommend.

1.5/10