Carroll’s boyfriend has been cheating on her. Together with Alyce, she tries to drown her sorrows in alcohol and drugs, which culminates in a crazy trip up onto the roof of Alyce’s apartment building. Once they’re up there, things take a turn for the worse and, Alyce accidentally pushes her friend off the roof. Panic breaks out, and Alyce does everything she can to cover up what happened, until she finds out that Carroll has actually survived the fall… How is she supposed to hide it now?
It draws you in
On paper, this doesn’t really seem like much of a winner, but as the film progresses, you become more and more drawn into it. The decadence is painfully obvious, and there’s time both for reflection and satirical dialogue.
It’s not really an entertaining movie, that is to say, it’s a pitch-black story unfolding in front of the camera, and the only humor there is would have to be extremely dark!
What follows is a mixture of a ghost story, in which Carroll haunts her best friend Alyce, and a study of psychological suffering. There’s a constant sense that you don’t really know what is actually going on. What state Alyce’s mental health is really in, and how much of the plot is taking place entirely inside her head. For a while, when I realized that Carroll’s last name in the film was Lewis and that they were already talking about rabbit holes as a metaphor for social failure at the very beginning of the film, I thought it was going to be an exceptionally intelligent interpretation of Alice in Wonderland. It can’t possibly be a coincidence that they chose the names they did.
Non explored theme
But this theme isn’t really explored, or perhaps it’s done in such a way that I simply don’t understand it. After all, I’m hardly an expert on Lewis Carroll’s children’s books from the second half of the 19th century. The rabbit hole instead becomes a metaphor for the downward spiral of decadence, and if there really are more metaphors in there, then the drug dealer Rex would presumably be the equivalent of the Mad Hatter.
As you can easily figure out, there is no happy ending to this story. There are no winners, really, only losers. I like the dark tone, but toward the end it feels as though we’ve already seen everything the film has to offer. The pace is a little sluggish, and personally I’m not particularly fond of when scenes are exaggerated to the point where you have to see intestines spilling out of someone’s body. It’s just unnecessary sensationalism that very rarely serves any real purpose.
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