Welcoming, but sort of disappointing effort to bring to the screen this modern age version of Carmilla, the classic horror/Gothic/romantic vampire story written by Sheridan Lefanu.
The movie has a crafted cinematography (probably the plus of the movie) and direction. It succeeded to create a bittersweet horror dream like atmosphere that by the last third of the film makes us completely hooked into it. Contributing to that is the awesome performance of Julia Pietrucha on the hole of Carmilla, a seductive young lady that end up becoming an supernatural entity that feed from the blood of virgin women.
The things go south when we see the high potential that the script could had have and was thrown away. Seeing that it putted the story in a modern age era and created an intriguing situation for the reason why Lara and her father are brought to this ancient castle in Styria is a good point but at the same time, it turned some of the characters, that are so intense and romantically tragic in the book, in flat weak evil characters for the example of the General Spiegel.
The glimpse of women empowerment message that it brings with the character of Carmilla, and the hole situation of her possible "transformation" don't pay back when her supernatural objectives come to life in a really distorted way... and when we have such weak character as Lara, that sometimes is over exposed as a goth teen spoiled teenager that cut herself and has pictures of Ian Curtis on her walls. Not that the hole new wave and goth looks aren't cool but it's sometimes just too much.
Though the soundtrack is good, the visuals are great, it's just the text and editing that could be better to live up to the expectations to bring a great reinterpretation of this great novel to life.
The movie has a crafted cinematography (probably the plus of the movie) and direction. It succeeded to create a bittersweet horror dream like atmosphere that by the last third of the film makes us completely hooked into it. Contributing to that is the awesome performance of Julia Pietrucha on the hole of Carmilla, a seductive young lady that end up becoming an supernatural entity that feed from the blood of virgin women.
The things go south when we see the high potential that the script could had have and was thrown away. Seeing that it putted the story in a modern age era and created an intriguing situation for the reason why Lara and her father are brought to this ancient castle in Styria is a good point but at the same time, it turned some of the characters, that are so intense and romantically tragic in the book, in flat weak evil characters for the example of the General Spiegel.
The glimpse of women empowerment message that it brings with the character of Carmilla, and the hole situation of her possible "transformation" don't pay back when her supernatural objectives come to life in a really distorted way... and when we have such weak character as Lara, that sometimes is over exposed as a goth teen spoiled teenager that cut herself and has pictures of Ian Curtis on her walls. Not that the hole new wave and goth looks aren't cool but it's sometimes just too much.
Though the soundtrack is good, the visuals are great, it's just the text and editing that could be better to live up to the expectations to bring a great reinterpretation of this great novel to life.