Letterboxd has got me in an anecdotal mood; regarding The World to Come:
I can just imagine the conceptual meeting now: “How to visually convey the existential frigidity of coldly repressive societies in the pre-electricity age (or, as a character so artfully puts it: “Everything is tedious and lonesome”)?!?! By George, I think I’ve got it (and by it, I mean a super novel idea, obviously): let’s drain the color saturation, and drown the image under a murky grey sheen!!!!! Has anyone tried that before?! We geniuses!”
“Natural-looking” dim lighting is all well and good, but candlelit eras need not be so ocularly dreary and dull; for example: Kenny’s All Is True.
True story: I constantly confuse All Is True with All Is Lost … which are, besides both being vanity projects revolving around legends of a certain age, very different movies.
As not a Crown watcher, I must be last in line to board the Vanessa Kirby bandwagon, thanks to her standoutsaboves in The World to Come and Pieces of a Woman.
Release calendars with seasonal norms can alter how audiences receive certain movies; for instance, unleashing The World to Come on the world in the run-up to the Academy Awards either amplifies or creates the feeling that it’s less-than-tasty Oscars bait. Granted, if it had the goods, nominations would enhance its profile like little else. But since it doesn’t, maybe I would’ve been more receptive if it had been positioned differently. As in: not directly next to what’s conventionally considered the year’s best.
Is the title a punny innuendo? The surface interpretation probably speaks to it being a love story made more for the new(ish) world to come than the old(ish) world the lovers occupy (explanation of the ishes: we haven’t come nearly far enough!). But might the title also pertain to the potential tradeoff posed to them: they’re risking the worlds they knew — AKA: the particulars of their lives — in the name of, well, coming. Yes, that’d be a blunt reduction of what they offer each other … but they’re also not not contemplating trading their worlds to indeed come.
Or am I just perverted?
