Review of Synecdoche, New York (2008) by Michael H — 05 Oct 2010

This movie is a lot of things at once. Pretentious, too packed with oblique ideas, demanding, self-absorbed, intense, overlong; and so on. Following a self-loathing stage director as he attempts to capture Existence in a single play, Synecdoche, NY barrels from incomprehensible Lynchian surrealism to Borgesian hall-of-mirrors-ism - complete with a recursive diagram of the production sporting a Droste effect.

In turns nihilistic, humanistic, existential, always closing in on itself despite the ever-increasing grandeur of the project at its heart, this is a movie about most things, if not all things. It's also hard to describe.

I look forward to returning to it again, maybe in a year or so.