I sleep and I see. Endorphin is a strange and ambiguous picture. Its author, Andre Turpen, is known primarily as a master of cameramanship. Film lovers are familiar with his joint work with Xavier Dolan (“Mommy”, “Tom on the farm”, “It’s only the end of the world”) and Denny Villeneuve (“Whirlpool”, “Fires”). However, Turpen is not a beginner in the director's chair - his early feature film "Cosmos", staged with the same Villeneuve and four other co-authors, as well as the next, already completely independent work "Crab in the Head" at one time were warmly welcomed by critics and fans of indie movies. Then there was a long break in the full meter, and then the Endorphin appeared.
The action of the tape starts with a fascinating surreal exhibition. On a deserted street, a girl moves with ragged stroboscopic steps. I'll meet her with a bus with sleeping people in the windows. The experienced viewer nods satisfiedly and settles more comfortably in the chair.
Next, the action is transferred to a conference room, where a teacher of quantum physics gives a lecture about how little we know about the real world. “We perceive the outside world with the help of our senses, but our senses deceive us,” says the learned lady, and the sophisticated viewer prepares to clap his hands, anticipating the feast of intelligence and aesthetics. The feast, however, is accompanied by a spoonful of tar.
The film is powerfully intriguing at the start, keeps good half an hour in suspense, then suddenly sags sharply and the rest of the time hangs like a ragged film to no less powerfully disappoint in the final. Those who mastered the second part of the film only out of a desire to know how this kunstuk will end, may remain puzzled: "And this is all?" Indeed, such a famously twisted puzzle could be solved by a less trivial denouement. When you don’t know what to say, say gladiolus.
However, since we were talking about scientific matters at the beginning, we will remember them at the end. If we approach Endorphin not with the standards of classical mechanics of the mainstream, but with the formulas of quantum physics of art-house, the tape is quite worthy that fans of this wave of film art paid a half hour of attention to the work of Turpen. After all, art house is not so much a narrative as a meditation. And for meditation in "Endorphin" places with more than a lot.
6 out of 10