Get the latest gossip
‘Panopticon’ Review: A Starkly Relevant Story of Warped Masculinity in Georgia
George Sikharulidze's "Panopticon" excavates the religiosity and right-wing ideology that make one Georgian teen's coming of age so conflicted.
But Sikharulidze’s clever screenplay soon deepens and complicates his characterization, making him quietly emblematic of the masculinity crisis being navigated by Georgia’s younger generation, in which modern, progressive values do battle with sexism, right-wing ideology and a strain of ancient religious hypocrisy that leaches like a toxin into the bloodstream of the body social. Backdropped by mottled walls and faded wallpapers, Ketevan Nadibaidze’s muted production design makes the most of both domestic spaces and coldly impersonal institutional interiors: locker rooms, classrooms, the dingy monastery to which Sandro’s father absconds after he decides to become a monk. Even though in the casting of Sukhitashvili it nods to the more formally severe “Beginning,” and even though it features a snippet of Alexander Koberidze’s wondrous and whimsical “What Do We See When We Look At The Sky?” Sikharulidze’s film in fact splits the difference between those titles’ overtly allegorical nature and the restraint and unadorned focus of the Romanian New Wave.
Or read this on Variety