Quick Review #30: "Aru tozasareta yuki no sansou de"

Title: Aru tozasareta yuki no sansou de / ある閉ざされた雪の山荘で

Rating: 2 /10

Recommended for: 

I would struggle to recommend this to anyone, even those who are fans of the cast.

Liked:

None

Disliked: 

- For a start, I didn't notice that the film was based on a Higashino Keigo novel and simply approached this just like any other suspense movie. As such, I did not have any basis of comparison with the original nor any expectations on how the movie should turn out. However, I had a bad vibe about how the movie would go when I saw that the most important element as depicted in the title i.e. a mansion on a snowy mountain where the people were trapped inside was non-existent. In fact, the characters had to pretend that they were really in such a dire situation. As the story developed, the whole scenario was so silly and laughable that it didn't take a genius to see that the murders were not real. To top it off, the way the climax scene was handled just felt like a fiasco for nothing. While it may have been justifiable for the wronged to take revenge for what happened, the ending just cemented the feeling that the all-ends-well and all-was-forgiven fairytale-like conclusion made me feel like the whole movie was a waste of time. I really wonder, was the original story this bad or was the adaptation the issue?

- One reason why I was interested in watching this was the cast. They are a group of promising and up-and-coming younger generation actors so to put so many of them together in one movie, it made me curious about how things would turn out. Sad to say, the movie didn't feature them favourably - not just in terms of how unlikeable most of the characters were but the setting made them look like such poor actors, not acting professionals in a theatre group. It was terribly disappointing because I've seen some really promising work from them in the past so it can't be that their acting suddenly deteriorated to this extent overnight. The reason why I still gave this movie a 2 is for their brave efforts despite how the movie eventually turned out.