Popular reviews

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  Review by Sean Baker 16

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Winner of Best Film at Denmark's Bodil Awards 2019.

  Was very impressed with Victoria Carmen Sonne in Winter Brothers so have been looking forward to this for awhile. I had no idea what I was in store for. The film begins (at least on Mubi) with a warning that the film contains a scene of simulated sexual violence. Well, the simulation is impossible to recognize and it is seriously one of the most disturbing scenes I've ever seen. I listened to an interview with director Isabella Eklöf who describes how it was done - very impressive effects and choreography.

  Isabella Eklöf (writer of Border and location manager of Let the Right One In) pulls no punches with this portrait of…

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  Review by Lucinda ★★★★½ 9

  Unusually insightful about the ways women are conditioned to play nice and put on our people-pleasing personas even as terrible things are done to us, and about the ways anger can be misdirected when it’s too risky or destabilising to confront the underlying reason for it.

  At no point did I feel unsympathetic towards the main character’s point of view, and I was pissed off about a question in the Q&A that assumed the film deliberately set out to mess with audiences’ feelings towards her and how likeable she was (FFS).

  Interesting to hear Isabella Eklöf talk about the poster and how it deliberately makes the film look sexier and implies a revenge narrative that doesn’t actually exist. The way…

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★ 1

  This isn't playing REVENGE's tantalizing genre games, it's not IRREVERSIBLE's descent into Hell. Closer to ELLE but guts you with its patient austerity as opposed to Verhoeven's excited provocations. This'll be sticking with me.

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  Review by Kai Perrignon ★★★★½ 19

  Clinical, despairing look at a naive young woman gradually understanding then sadly accepting the systemic misogyny that permeates the world. Haneke-esque simple long takes, blind whites and blue hues surrounding acts of savage violence and complicity. Has maybe the most graphic and terrible act of sexual violence I've seen in a film (more so than Irreversible which is at least placed within a heightened cinematic space that allows a bit of distance. This is in your face objectivity, quiet and awful and normalised.). A slow burn, and I can't say one's patience is rewarded with anything other than resigned pain, but goddamnit this is a powerful piece of work. Isabella Eklöf is one to watch.

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  Review by ˗ˏˋ suspirliam ˊˎ˗ ★★★★ 2

  not having 'summer bummer' by lana del rey playing in the credits was a big missed opportunity

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  Review by LeSchroeck ★★★ 2

  Schwierig, weil so leer, so kalt, so steril und so gewollt belanglos. Man merkt, hinter den Proleten mit Geld steckt Mieses. Man sieht auch, dass Sascha immer wieder Knüppel zwischen die Beine kriegt, wenn sie so etwas wie einen Ausbruch aus dieser, ihrer Welt wagt. Aber man kriegt eben nicht viel, um nachzuvollziehen, warum sie das eigentlich gar nicht so oft oder sehr will. Stattdessen wird der Zuschauer mit ein paar Szenen konfrontiert, die schon verstören, irritieren oder entrüsten können. Eben, weil sie so echt, direkt und unerwartet hereinbrechen. Und dann erneut untermauern, wie sinnlos jede Gegenwehr erscheint. Allerdings darf man keinen nächsten "Irreversible" erwarten. Dafür fehlt es an Furiosität und Intensität. Der Vergleich mit "Elle" ist naheliegender - minus…

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  Review by Jacob Knight ★★★★½

  Were ‘18 to end today, Holiday may very well rank as my #1 movie of the year, for the simple reason that I haven't been able to shake the troubling feeling it left me with since first seeing it in January. Isabella Eklöf's cold, precise, detached tale of a gangster's mistress – Victoria Carmen Sonne, delivering a freshman performance that's absolutely devastating – who learns what it means to become an object (and how she chooses to live with that fact) could have never been made by men. Because Eklöf – who also co-wrote the outstanding modern fairy tale, Border, which NEON is distributing later this year – is making a movie about a woman coming to terms with becoming…

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  Review by Tino Hahn

  Das Poster und das Key-Motiv sind reiner Etikettenschwindel, die ganze Hysterie um "DIE SZENE!!!!!!!EINSELF!!!!" entlarvt eher ein rührend naives Weltbild der empörten Reviewer und trotzdem bzw. gerade deshalb ist 'Holiday' ein ebenso faszinierender wie frustrierender 'Slice of Life'-Einblick in das widersprüchliche Leben einer jungen Frau namens Sascha, die sich maskulinen Machtmechanismen weder wirklich entziehen kann noch will. Der sezierende und unerbittliche Stil der Paradies-Trilogie von Ulrich Seidl trifft auf das fatalistische Weltbild von A Hole in My Heart.

  Es gibt längst keine moralisch integeren Lösungen mehr, sondern nur noch wie Übersprungshandlungen wirkende Entscheidungen, mit denen sich Sascha tiefer und tiefer reinreitet und jeder Versuch, diesen Teufelskreis zu durchbrechen, verendet inkonsequent in einer verstörenden Mischung aus Lethargie und fehlender Selbstachtung.

  Eigene…

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  Review by joe 💀🔪🏳️‍🌈 ★½

  this movie: watch 60 minutes of absolutely nothing then an eye bleedingly graphic rape scene then even more nothing because idk its artistic and thought provoking or something fuck you

  you guys: omg cinnamon tography. pastel colours! woman director yas queen!!! i LOVE pointless shock value! <3

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  Review by wounded kite ★★★★

  Starts off as a brutal examination of casual misogyny that plays a bit like Michael Haneke trying his hand at a mob tale... until director Isabella Eklöf reveals her true intentions in the final stretch. Not the feminist splatter flick hinted at by the poster, Holiday is something far more subtle, and ultimately, horrifying.

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  Review by Héctor ★★★

  i feel a little disappointed because i was expecting something different. the poster made me think about something more gory and bloody but anyways. i am not saying that i did not like it but it could've been better.

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  Review by DJ_Keyser ★★★★½ 11

  I must say, I had a REALLY different impression about what this film was going to be like. I’d heard comparisons to Coralie Fargeat’s 2017 film, Revenge, but in my opinion Isabella Eklöf’s feature debut is the complete antithesis to it. There is no fantastical phoenix rising from the ashes of trauma narrative to be found here, in its place a merciless portrait of intimate partner violence and abuse that feels all too real.

  Eklöf uses every inch of the screen to create an atmosphere of underlying dread, the threat of unprovoked aggression and hostility ever present, lurking in foregrounds, backgrounds and the corners of the frame. Holiday perfectly captures the insidious nature of callous human cruelty, the devastating impact…