Get the latest gossip
‘The Message’ Review: An Uneventful Drama About a Young Pet Medium
Iván Fund’s black-and-white road movie 'The Message' squanders its emotional potential.
There’s nothing particularly sinister about their dynamic, even though Roger occasionally wanders off in a huff, and Myriam ensures that Anika always has an intermediary, despite the young girl intuiting incredibly meaningful and poetic messages left for human companions. A handful of melancholy moments — during which Anika gazes wistfully out of the trio’s van window, or yearns for spare change in exchange for her fallen baby teeth — gesture towards some lingering emptiness in her life. These shifts in mood are often matched by Mauro Mourelos’ score, which uses horns in various tones and iterations to capture these transitions, but these musical highlights — much like the effect of its performances — are far more observed than felt, a fallout of an artistic approach that proves too matter-of-fact for the material at hand.
Or read this on Variety