always fun to catch up with stuff like this after everyone has picked it clean and no longer cares to still review it like it's a serbian film or like we need to preface even talking about it with a notes app apology. anyway, with the dust settled i will say that i do sort of agree that dominik overplays a few of the broad symbols he's borrowed from carol oates to a kind of easy and monotonous degree after a certain point (primarily the daddy issue stuff), but the idea that this is an extreme snuff disaster with no sympathy or pathos is also pretty perplexing to me. i mean it's obviously not quite on the level of its inspirations (lynch, stone, etc) and i'll let people more well-versed than me figure out how "responsibly" this uses marilyn's real life/history (i was just happy they included niagara, she's really wonderful in that movie), but the overall concept here of hollywood image as psychodrama horror, or an industry of artifice and misogyny depicted like the arthouse miserabilism sunset boulevard that it might've felt like is imo a worthy one to pursue, and this delivers on it in ways both effectively upsetting and moving.

and i totally get why and sympathize with the instinct to immediately take him to task for them but as for the troubling biases and attitudes towards his subject that dominik might have inadvertently peppered this with, instead of playing like hypocrisy ("well he's showing how hollywood objectified and abused her by just doing that himself!") they honestly kind of contributed to the inescapable meat grinder feeling this has. intentional or not the chosen POV of this had me thinking back to the line from nicholas ray's in a lonely place: "it was the act of a sick mind with the urge to destroy something young and lovely." pretty perverse stuff. and, admittedly, maybe i'm just a total mark, but the knockoff laura palmer score at the end had the desired effect it was looking for from me.