This Must Be the Place
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
- drama
The story
A bored, retired rock star living in Ireland sets out to find his dead father's tormentor, an ex-Nazi war criminal who is a refugee in the U.S.
What it’s like
Slow, deliberately composed frames with saturated, painterly color: Dublin's grey streets give way to sun-bleached desert highways, wide empty landscapes shot from a distance, and interiors lit by warm lamplight or flat afternoon glare. Sorrentino's camera drifts through long, stylised tracking shots, and the score leans on a mournful, synth-tinged rock sensibility with a lot of silence between songs. The mood is wry, dreamlike and melancholic, a surreal road-trip drift that suits a lazy afternoon or a late evening when you want something strange but unhurried. Its pacing is languid and digressive, and its emotional register is quietly absurd, with an aging, detached man slowly reckoning with his father's history and reopening himself to other people along the way. Violence is mostly offstage or implied, with a few sharp, uneasy moments tied to the past; there is no gore, and the darker material about the Holocaust lands as sorrow and recollection rather than graphic horror. It is for viewers who enjoy art-house stylishness, odd humour and a meditative, character-led journey.
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