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The skilled ensemble cast shifts between roles, playing both the hosts and the stranded interlopers while using details that keep everything clear. Certain people come into clearer focus to provide deeper significance and provoke audience involvement. Songs express complex inner feelings with a lovely kick of offhanded wit, which makes a large number of characters memorable as they cope with both enormous issues and private reactions. Along the way, relationships blossom and crumble, and an enduring sense of community is created.

While the tone is generally light and uplifting, there are dark angles throughout the story, including striking depictions of uncertainty, fear of the unknown and some scary bigotry. And there's also a vivid sense of how the mood of the entire world shifted on that day. It's challenging to see how these people find common ground, bonding across language and cultural barriers over families and religion. And way this unusual situation changed the perspectives of the people who lived through it is powerfully engaging, and often moving.

themes, language

10.Sep.21

Indeed, the beautiful ensemble cast keeps their emotions inside, which makes the youthful characters more intriguing than sympathetic. The most emotionally expressive roles go to Sophusdottir as the startled-by-love Sigga, with Mattsson in an evocative smaller role as the yearning, still-wounded Carla. Each side character has a personal issue that makes him or her distinct, while several offbeat details add splashes of colour. But everyone remains muted, and their interaction is whispery.

The plot is so loose that it feels like it'll never get to a point. This prevents us from properly investing in the characters, so we're left to admire the scenery and small moments while waiting for something deliberate to happen. Newsom's poetic approach urges us to slow down and quietly take in the deeper things that are gurgling under the surface, most notably Sigga's inability to ignore how she feels about the charismatic Nikki. And both love and pain are what makes her feel alive.

themes, language

7.Sep.21

Performances are loose and real, with bracing moments of tightly wound emotion. So even if the playwright's hand can be felt in the dialog and situations, these are authentic people who have larger lives off-screen. They also come together in ways that hint at the long years they've known each other. The superb Pollono, Bernthal and Whigham find strong chemistry together as lifelong buddies, while House and Delgado have intense moments of their own as the story takes its harrowing turn. And bristling conflicts between older and younger characters are vivid.

Pollono works to expand the story beyond the play's tightly contained four characters, although the frequent fragmented cutaways don't really add much to the fine actors' storytelling. That said, the initial set-up sequences do provide strong texture to what comes later. So as the film shifts from an edgy comedy into a pitch-black thriller, it navigates the tonal switch adeptly by maintaining the emotional resonance, keeping us engaged even as things get seriously heightened.

themes, language, violence

8.Sep.21