Forma (2013) Online

This might have been a nice 20 min. short movie.

The plot itself sounds interesting. a young woman takes revenge on her high-school classmate years later.

But this is just boring. yes, you can make minute long shots on city-life but there is just no substance here, the plot does not sustain more than 2 hours .

looking for minutes on boxes in a storage room with hints of a fight in the background, this is not art - its making fun of viewers.

this is definitely one of the worst movies I have ever seen in a festival or elsewhere. I would rather watch a Ozu movie for 500 times.

Forma is on the slow side of Japanese cinema. This is not per se a bad thing, if it helps adding to the mood, but Forma celebrates its slowness for unknown purposes.

About halfway through the movie, it is obvious how the cold drama will end. It doesn't keep Sakamoto from telling us the same story from different angles, even introducing new unnecessary characters. The 26min long climax scene starts off nice, but after a while it feels repetitive and boring, telling the audience over and over again what everybody knows already. As a consequence, the lengthy "shocking revelation" had people start laughing.

Sakamoto needs more than two hours to tell Formas thin story, one hour less and it would have been an average movie with an interesting style- concept. But as it is, it's just painful to watch.

I definitely can understand people who disliked this film. But one thing is for sure: It offers a lot of thought provoking stuff to talk about. The story starts relatively easy going with two former school friends meeting again after years. Slowly but steadily the movie starts to evoke a bad feeling that something is going on beneath the surface and it roughly twists around and starts to become extremely evil without even having to show brutal or disgusting scenes. Ayumi Sakamoto really knows how to create an impervious atmosphere, she later said in a Q&A that she deliberately didn't use any close ups but knee shots and long shots to make sure to capture every emotion of all the present characters, so you kind of feel that you're right in the middle of it all. And it really worked! Also, little spoiler (!), she said that she didn't really write the script for the final scene but talked the actors through it all one time and then let the situation evolve its own way.

All in all I was really surprised by how well the movie was made for a debut and how good the impact of the maleficent atmosphere actually was. If you happen to like Shinya Tsukamotos movies, who she worked for as a director assistant, you should certainly give it a try!

(sorry for bad English)