MovieChat Forums > Southbound (2016) Discussion > I think people are missing the point of ...

I think people are missing the point of the movie...


I see a lot of people complaining about the lack of explanation of things. I see people saying, this movie is a WTF?

YES. It is supposed to be a WTF?

This is a throw back to old horror. If I am not mistaken, the scene in the diner in the beginning, was showing a scene from the Twilight Zone. If not, it reminded me of it.

With old horror, they leave things to your imagination. This is the same thing here.

Is this purgatory? Does it matter? It maybe, it's up to you to decide if it is hell on earth, purgatory, or something else. What is clear is that this is a place where people get judged for their sins.

What are the sins?

Well, here is the thing, this is intentionally left blank. You fill in your sins. Use your imagination and fill in the blank, or you fill in the blank with your own sins.

By letting you fill in your sins, it makes you involved in the movie. It makes it personal and scary. It makes YOU ponder, oh *beep* what if this is purgatory, and maybe I gotta think about *beep* like this.

Maybe you don't even care or believe, but there is a whole portion of society that does. And even when you don't believe in all of that, there is still a small part that thinks, oh *beep* what if I am wrong.

This movie touches in on those things. It is to put a mirror back on you the viewer and fill in the blank.

Here let me show you what I mean:
- The last scene, the criminals were wearing masks that looked like old people. My thought was, I wonder if he killed his dad because he couldn't afford his medical bills. Does that fit in with the picture at the end? I could create a story that makes it fit.

But maybe some one else could fill in another blank about the little girl.

- The scene where the girl was being judged for leaving her friend. That has all type of fill in the blank implications. Especially for a 15-28 year old watching the movie. It can touch on any specific item in their life where they felt they abandoned some one. It could be anything really.

The thing is, when things are left open, it is left open for YOU to judge. It is not difficult to fill in the blank for the writer or director. It's actually harder to leave out the blank and let the audience fill it in.

That film like any good twilight zone, leaves you a bit introspective, and that's the scary part.

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I don't mind ambiguity. And I don't think that artists (authors/directors/etc) need to fill in every little blank for the viewer.

But to me there was an element of disconnect and inconsistency that made the movie feel haphazard. It didn't feel like things that were cleverly left blank--it felt like someone just couldn't be bothered to give the movie a strong thematic backbone.

The fact that a girl is being tortured/terrorized/killed for leaving a friend behind at a club just smacks of laziness to me. And the detail that she left to hook up with some guy just feels like old-fashioned sex shaming. How is running off to have sex so much worse than driving distractedly/recklessly? I'd argue that the former is much less risky than the latter, yet the movie does not treat them equally at all.

Many of the stories felt rushed or half-baked (like the man trying to "rescue" the sister). I thought that "The Accident", with its gory dark humor and surreal staging, was the strongest of the group, and the rest were pretty middling.

Even the fact that at the end the girl was killed intentionally felt off to me.

I guess I can't tell you that it's wrong if the movie got your imagination going. I felt like it left far too much unexplained and tried to coast on tepid, predictable "twists" that didn't land very well.

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If I am not mistaken, the scene in the diner in the beginning, was showing a scene from the Twilight Zone. If not, it reminded me of it.

The film shown is 'Carnival of Souls', another aspect pointing to purgatory.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055830/?ref_=nv_sr_1

We've met before, haven't we?

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