Jun-seo Park

Nine minutes to establish a world where people meet at a pool at night because the water remembers them, and it never once stops to explain the rule. It just plays it. The reveal is a reflection that arrives half a second late. I rewound. Every reflection after that is late too, and nobody in the film ever mentions it.

This is the film that made me want to cut crime instead of writing it. Sixteen minutes, four locations, and the geography is perfect. I drew the map. The map is correct. Also the shot through the car wash, which I have now tried to copy twice and failed twice, both times for different reasons.

Every cut in this is late. Deliberately late. You stay in the shot a half second after the information has arrived, and by the fourth time you start bracing for it. That is how the film makes you nervous without a single note of score until minute twelve. I would not change a frame, which I say about almost nothing.

Sixteen minutes shot almost entirely under streetlights and it never turns into orange soup, which is a small miracle. There is a handoff at a bus shelter done in one take with a focus pull I would like to shake somebody's hand about. It goes soft for a beat on the wrong face and then finds the right one. I have watched that pull maybe twenty times.

A hundred and two minutes of people failing to leave Los Angeles and I have never wanted to visit more. It is loose in the middle. About twenty minutes of it is two men in a car and only twelve of those minutes are good. Then the wedding happens and the film remembers what it is. The last scene, in a doughnut shop at six in the morning, is one of my favourite endings on here.