adonis98-743-186503 Inspired by a true crime, a man begins to experience mystifying events that lead him to slay his mother with a sword. I gave this flick a chance cause of Michael Shannon but damn it was just disappointing, weird and just bad from start to finish. I mean it hardly made any sense at all and even the perfomances couldn't exactly hold it off from being a huge waste of my time. The film is really weird and unfortunately not in a good way and it's probably on Herzog's part that whole flaw i guess. Now i wouldn't recommend this to be honest guys. (0/10)

SnoopyStyle Detectives Havenhurst (Willem Dafoe) and Vargas (Michael Peña) are called to a crime scene. Mrs. McCullam has been stabbed to death. Her son Brad McCullam (Michael Shannon) is the prime suspect and he has taken hostages in the house across the street. The police interviews his fiancé Ingrid Gudmundson (Chloë Sevigny) and director Lee Meyers (Udo Kier) who reveal past incidents and his mental deterioration.This is Werner Herzog and therefore it must be a masterpiece. He is taking the familiar cop crime drama and mixing it with a character study of a disturb mind. He has created his own language and a wonderful new form of cinema. What if this is not Werner Herzog? Then this would be a confusing, boring piece of crap. The constant reliance on flashbacks drains any immediacy and tension from the movie. These are great actors. The structure of the movie really let the whole thing down. Instead of his voice, his vision is a mess of the traditional genre.

Cosmoeticadotcom Shannon is pitch perfect with his madness, starting from a Peruvian kayaking trip he demurs from (the scene of the start of another of Herzog's great films on insanity, Aguirre: The Wrath Of God), which kills his friends, to his assumption of the name Farouk, to his belief that the face of God resides on an oatmeal container, to his calm bizarreness in general. Sevigny is excellent as the clueless and desperately lonely fiancée, while Kier delights as the agog friend- and Herzog makes ironic use of Kier's iconic stature as a horror film actor to rein him in to comment on assorted bizarre things he witnesses, such as the over the top scenes between Brad and his loony and racist ostrich farming uncle Ted (Brad Dourif), which ends in a classic 'Herzog Moment' involving a dwarf. While Dourif chews scenery, it's perfectly apropos to the moment the film unhinges itself, and also given that we see this partly from Brad's POV. Other odd moments occur when we see Brad at Machu Picchu, in a Tibetan marketplace, and seeking to buy pillows for 'the sick, in general, ' at a San Diego military hospital, and often these scenes, retrospectively, are seen as telegraphed earlier, but not in the ham-handed way a Steven Spielberg would do so. The film ends with Brad's surrender, and asking Havenhurst two questions: 1) could he put in his report that it was ostriches running, not flamingos, that were the birds involved, and 2) what happened to his basketball, which, in the film's final shot, we see a small boy pluck out of the branches of a tree.Herzog's direction is flawless, and cameraman Peter Zeitlinger does his usual sparkling cinematography by making blasé San Diego seem feral. Ernst Reijseger's score is apropos to the scenes, but the weak link is the film's screenplay, written by Herzog and Herbert Golder. It is good, for all it does; the problem is with just a few more moments and scenes, here and there, this 91 minute film, at 100 or so minutes, could have hit greatness. Some critics missed the boat and panned this excellent work, usually bemoaning it as a bastard love child between director Herzog and producer David Lynch, but there is little Lynchian material here. It is all Herzog. And it is definitely NOT a black comedy. Moments of humor do not make a film a comedy. It is straight on drama, and very realistic to the point that its utter lack of real poesy hurts it, artistically. Still, this is a relative claim since Herzog oozes cinematic poesy in almost all his films.

rael I'm pleasantly surprised by the movie thanks to people's negative comments. Good acting, good rhythm, the dialog doesn't knock you out of the mood that the film has going. Willem Dafoe and Chloe Sevigny are especially comfortable in this one. Didn't like the ending. But that's always the case with arty movies about something vague. For the most part the thing was not pretentious. Art-house viewers keep expecting that legendary moment of cinematic epiphany to hit them. And it never does. I mean it's a movie about acting, directing and pretty landscapes. Maybe the disappointed viewers wanted a smart SWAT thriller or something.