One of my all time favorites.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I was attracted to this movie because Netflix claimed it was about multiple personalities (Dissociative Identity Disorder), a topic which is close to home for me. What I found in this movie was not DID, but whatever it was, it was still carried out very artistically and beautifully. The movie is a cinematic artwork, not necessarily a traditional story, and it should be seen that way if it is to be appreciated. The pathology of the main character was very intriguing, but more or less metaphorical in practice. If anything, this girl's costumes are out of a desperate need to escape and be something she isn't - which is partially where DID comes from, but the real process is much less conscious or controlled. She is a girl ravaged by her past and doomed to walk the earth as a husk, a shadow, looking for a genuine and safe body to inhabit. Things like dissociation and depression are very similar in this, but not as artistic, and that's what I mean when I say the character is metaphorical - she's not meant to be taken literally, but rather artistically, through her costumes and her strange relationships. In the end, she does find a kind of peace, but never in a way the viewer would expect, and this too is metaphorical - coping and recovering is a violent process that may require one to metaphorically murder the things that hurt you most. Amy here simply gives us an artistic visual of that. This movie is not anything like what I expected, but I still very much enjoyed it. I always love things that force me to think.

This was not an easy film to watch. There is also no easy category to file it under so I am just going to call it a character study. Amy is an emotionally unstable young woman who works out her issues through visually stunning imagery sans audience. The imagery is neither pretentious or trite and the viewer gets the feeling that they are seeing work that the actress may have actually crafted herself. The pacing and tone of the film are unhurried and create an uneasy mood. The music is minimalistic, atmospheric and fitting. One of the things that I liked about this film, other than the aforementioned visual facets is that it isn't easy and is at times horribly uncomfortable(especially being a male viewer who has known women not wholly unlike Amy) and yet it is completely honest and original. I like the economy of means used in telling her story and would love to see more from this duo(Banker and Everson).

Browsing for movies, and saw this on netflix. Checked out the plot description and it had real potential to be an incredible movie. I should have checked IMDb, if a movie does not have a 6+ star rating on IMDb, I do not watch it.Honestly, there is not much positive I can say about the movie. The only thing worse than the story was the unbelievably bad direction, editing, acting, and plot execution. The only good thing about the movie was the music (and I believe it was one song replayed through every key point in the movie).The ending didn't feel right at all. In a movie, there is supposed to be a plot, that culminates in a final 'payoff', or a series of scenes late in the movie that make sense of the movie in its entirety. This movie didn't have that at all.Don't watch this movie, it was an hour and 20 minutes of my life I regret. I kept hoping the finale of the movie would make it all worth it; I was wrong. It doesn't even deserve the 1 star rating that I must give it in order to review it. It gets 0.5 star for actually being made (good job to whoever tried to make a movie and succeeded here -- it's still an awful movie).

Yep, the girl we see could be termed "self-loathing" or "mad". And yep she sometimes behaves in strange ways that irritate both her on-screen friends and us viewers.What we never see is what she was like _before_ "the trauma". What we see is that "the trauma" has permanently scarred her, so that all her attempts at rehabilitation are self-destructive, and her friends attempts at healing uniformly eventually fail.The skewed behavior we see is definitely _not_ what's recommended. If there's an (implied) "feminist message", it's something like "our sexist culture results in some individuals that are permanently so screwed up they not only can't help the culture, they can't even help themselves very much, like this one".What we see is the disaster resulting from "the trauma". Reading what we see as some sort of "recommendation" fundamentally misses the whole point.Watching a thoroughly screwed up person may be "educational", but it tends to not be all that much fun. So what else does this movie deliver? The first "what else" is that quite a few little bits are very funny, for example showing up to a porn shoot wearing a tongue-in-cheek skin-colored outfit (rather than a "birthday suit" as intended) and seducing the other model into playing along with the joke.And the second "what else" is quite a bit of truly interesting art. It's unconventional, and a lot of it is vaguely disturbing. Yet at the same time it's undeniably beautiful.This film is squarely in the "mumblecore" tradition: low production values, tiny crew, amateur actors, about the concerns of thirty-somethings, little or no music, and very naturalistic dialog. (I personally am not a big fan of "mumblecore" in general, and my rating reflects my generic dislike more than it does anything about this film specifically.)