Joel S
This is one of those slick unimaginative European art house flicks which thinks or can just throw a basic premise at you and nothing else and consequently fails to disappoint in the third act by the time you’ve invested into the central character with nothing reward
Awful. Lazy and pretentious.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
07/07/24
Full Review
Audience Member
A love triangle featuring the trophy girlfriend Sascha (Victoria Carmen Sonne) of a petty drug lord, caught up in a web of luxury and violence in a modern dark gangster tale set in the beautiful port city of Bodrum on the Turkish Riviera...
The film has clearly taken a bit too much inspiration from Gaspar Noés fantastic "Irréversible" and Ruben Östlund´s different storytelling style, but "Holiday" is not really succeeding in creating something memorable. The "chock" scenes are structured in many ways as the difficult scenes in "Irréversible", but hardly coming up to the same standard of Noés extreme visual content. It´s a too fragmented film and the director Isabella Eklöf´s effort to "chock" the audience reaches only halfways.
Trivia: It was screened in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition section at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. The film won four Bodil Awards, including Best Danish Film.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/21/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Sascha is a young woman whose older boyfriend is a drug dealer – and is also very controlling. The film seems to be an examination of her life with her boyfriend over several days. There were a couple of aspects of the film I liked. The lead actress who played Sascha is very good, and I liked how the cameral focused much of the film on her. The director captured the nuances of her character very well. Otherwise, I found the film rather boring. There is a story, but the story itself did not make a lot of sense to me; it seems that she meets two men on a boat from her homeland and begins to get pulled between wanting to go back home and staying with the life of luxury and money that she currently has. There is a demonstration of "toxic masculinity" with the male characters who control their women and control each other. But when I tried to add it all up, I couldn't come up with a story that really got me to think more deeply about Sascha and her situation. I give it a bare thumbs up, again for the camerawork and the acting, but the lack of a really hard-hitting story makes it for me a film I could have missed.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/20/23
Full Review
avant s
needed breaks to finish this movie and need to take a show after finishing this.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
Oana L
Watching Holiday was an incredible journey, but this isn't a journey everyone will enjoy. It's scandalous. It's beautiful. It's shocking. It can even feel frustrating at times. It's haunting. Some scenes stay with you long after having watched the movie. It's a wonderful display of toxic dynamics that will draw you in and take your breath away.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
10/17/19
Full Review
stephen c
Palpably tense and thematically complex, this is deeply uncomfortable viewing, with a graphic but wholly justified rape scene
The story of a sybaritic gangster's moll, Holiday delights in upending generic norms. In this sense, it's thematically similar to Coralie Fargeat's rape/revenge thriller, Revenge (2017), which also tackles androcentric genre tropes. First time director Isabella Eklöf has cited both Gaspar Noé and Ulrich Seidl as influences, and as in much of their work, it's difficult to tell whether she's conveying a point about an inherently amoral human condition, or just daring the audience to be offended. Co-written by Eklöf and Johanne Algren, the film is clinically detached from its subjects, but is it a post-MeToo narrative or an exploitative recreation of the male gaze? There are problems – it eschews narrative momentum and conventional character arcs, and has no interest in pathos – but this is an impressive debut.
The film tells the story of Sascha (Victoria Carmen Sonne), a young woman holidaying with her older boyfriend Michael (Lai Yde), and a group of his employees at a villa in Bodrum. Shortly after arriving, she meets Dutch man Thomas (Thijs Römer), and soon they're hanging out. However, Sascha never mentions she has a boyfriend, nor that he is a violent drug dealer who expects people to do exactly what he wants.
As mentioned, Holiday reminded me of Revenge; both are debut features from a young female director, both turn androcentric paradigms on their head, both are set in an almost exclusively male milieu, and both are highly confrontational (in Revenge, Fargeat makes the audience complicit with the male gaze by visually commodifying the body of the only women in the film, whilst in Holiday, Eklöf forces the audience into the position of a passive witness to a horrific rape). Thematically, they're also connected, albeit by way of inversion - Revenge is about a woman fighting back against the men who have exploited her; Holiday is about a woman either unable or unwilling to engage in such a fight.
Importantly, the rape scene (which is shot at a dispassionate distance in a single take) is framed by two key scenes. In the first, one of Michael's employees is beaten for a minor error, and in the second, desperate to get back into the group's good graces, the man hands out expensive gifts. The point is clear; just as he becomes more loyal after a violent reprimand, so does Sascha slide more into her role as sexual plaything.
The rape scene is also an excellent example of showing rather than telling. During the scene, someone is seen coming down the stairs, although we only see their legs as they stop and retreat. This character, whoever it is, is thus doing something that Eklöf refuses to allow the audience to do – close our eyes to the horror of what we're witnessing. This speaks to a societal instinct to evade that which causes repulsion, with Eklöf suggesting that closing one's eyes to suffering and violence doesn't mean it goes away.
Although Sascha is blameless when it comes to the rape, in other ways, she's complicit with her own exploitation. Crucially, she's more concerned with accruing materialistic trappings than with the humiliations she must endure in order to accrue them. This is not a story about a woman too beaten down to try to leave, it's a story about a woman who knows that if she leaves, she will lose her meal ticket, and in this sense, the film is partly a critique of materialism.
Aesthetically, the film is extremely controlled. For around an hour, next-to-nothing of consequence happens. There is method in Eklöf's restraint, however, with the narrative somnolence generating significant tension through a defamiliarisation of the mundane, rendering it unsettling. A karaoke session, in particular, is almost unbearably taut as we wait for an explosion of violence that may or may not come. Here, and elsewhere, Eklöf plays with audience expectation, especially genre conditioning; we're used to seeing things kick off in films about drug dealers, so we expect the same from Holiday.
In terms of problems, the lack of forward momentum will lead some to find the film boring, whilst the lack of character arcs will see others accuse it of being underwritten. Some people will also see the rape as unnecessarily degrading. And although all of this is by design, it has to be said that Eklöf does push non-incident past breaking point, and her refusal to develop the characters does make it difficult to empathise with anyone, including Sascha.
These problems notwithstanding, Holiday is an impressive first feature. Essentially about a woman who can adapt to anything so long as she has a credit card, it's bleak and difficult to watch, but it's also masterfully constructed and thematically complex. Pushing the boundaries of how a woman's body can be used on-screen, Eklöf asks questions without providing answers. Finding them is our job.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
03/30/23
Full Review
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