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Slack Bay

Play trailer 1:52 Poster for Slack Bay Released Apr 21, 2017 2h 2m Comedy Drama Play Trailer Watchlist
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65% Tomatometer 82 Reviews 42% Popcornmeter 100+ Ratings
Inspectors Machin and Malfoy investigate after tourists vanish from beaches on the Channel Coast.
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Slack Bay

Slack Bay

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Critics Consensus

Slack Bay won't resonate with all viewers, but for filmgoers attuned to absurd French farce, its slapstick chaos should deliver just enough belly laughs.

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Critics Reviews

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Jake Wilson The Age (Australia) Slack Bay is not always funny, but it's truly unique and in the long run, more emotionally powerful than might be expected. Rated: 4/5 Dec 21, 2017 Full Review David Stratton The Australian Slack Bay is a very weird concoction that won't be to everyone's taste. Yet this superbly photographed fabrication is, ultimately, strangely compelling. Rated: 3/5 Dec 8, 2017 Full Review Tara Brady Irish Times The surreal, discombobulating Slack Bay sees the director take an even weirder, Pythonesque turn. Rated: 3/5 Jun 29, 2017 Full Review Michael J. Casey Michael J. Cinema A bourgeois farce made by a filmmaker who is above such silly matters. Rated: 1.5/5 May 13, 2021 Full Review Elissa Suh StageBuddy.com Watching Slack Bay is like listening to a stranger's overlong joke. Mar 13, 2020 Full Review Nicholas Bell IONCINEMA.com Dumont glides deliriously into territories so nonsensical he freely blends wistful notes of the grotesque and profane into sacerdotal mystique for a film treatment as profoundly off-putting as it is fascinating. Rated: 3.5/5 Oct 9, 2019 Full Review Read all reviews

Audience Reviews

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Audience Member Bruno Dumont's film Slack Bay (French title La Moute), released in the U. S. last year, resists easy labels and categorizations. It somehow manages to be both baldly plain in its purpose and entirely baffling. Most critics responded with either disinterest or disgust. Audiences hated it even more, judging by its 35% score on Rotten Tomatoes. I found it thrilling. Calling it merely a "farce" might be too tame for capturing just what boundaries it crosses and how far it goes. There is a cartoonish quality in which bourgeois culture is savagely lampooned (Juliet Binoche has never skittered about the screen quite so dimwittedly and hysterical as she does in Dumont's film). But, underneath the hijinks, there's a heart black as coal. Slack Bay takes the "eat the rich" dictum literally, and never before have I seen a film shuffle back and forth between the genres of screwball and body-horror so nonchalantly. Stately compositions and strikingly crisp cinematography frame these otherwise incongruous worlds, adding to the overall absurdist conflation that is this film. Slack Bay strikes so many outlandish postures at once, it seems absolutely capable of anything. During the film, one character, played by Fabriche Luchini, remarks on his estate's view overlooking the eponymous bay, "One sees it so much, one no longer notices it anymore." Nothing is familiar in Slack Bay, and, because of that, you notice everything. Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/06/23 Full Review Audience Member What a waste of time. Rated 1 out of 5 stars 01/19/18 Full Review Audience Member Una delicia absoluta. Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/15/23 Full Review Audience Member I've wasted 2 hours of my life that I can't get back. Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars 02/22/23 Full Review steve w I found this mostly irritating and very unfunny when I watched it. Every time that something happened which piqued my interest, a moment or two later some piece of leaden humour - usually involving someone falling over - would kill the pleasure. It just shows how brilliant Laurel and Hardy were in creating timeless comedy out of the same ingredients of physical humour and simplistic characterization. Rated 1 out of 5 stars 03/30/23 Full Review Audience Member This is one of the strangest movies I've ever seen. Some brilliant actors performing so over-the-top it becomes annoying and embarrassing. The director takes desperate measures to insert laugh-aloud moments in a dark comedy that includes graphic cannibalism, but in the end they lead nowhere, which led many in the screening I attended to the exit. Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars 02/26/23 Full Review Read all reviews
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Movie Info

Synopsis Inspectors Machin and Malfoy investigate after tourists vanish from beaches on the Channel Coast.
Director
Bruno Dumont
Producer
Jean Bréhat, Rachid Bouchareb, Muriel Merlin
Screenwriter
Bruno Dumont
Distributor
Kino Lorber
Production Co
arte France Cinéma, 3B Productions, Pallas Film, Twenty Twenty Vision Filmproduktion, WDR/Arte
Genre
Comedy, Drama
Original Language
French (France)
Release Date (Theaters)
Apr 21, 2017, Limited
Release Date (Streaming)
Aug 1, 2017
Box Office (Gross USA)
$112.4K
Runtime
2h 2m
Aspect Ratio
Scope (2.35:1)
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