I have heard since childhood that sugar kills. But not to the same extent! (c) Louisa Warren is a rather “fruitful” director. Her previous works (namely, a series of films about the offended bogeyman aka The Bride of the Scarecrow and The Curse of the Scarecrow) and this work are shot with small time intervals, and - most interestingly, in the same location, and even with the same actors.
Speaking of actors. To get into this film, a time loop was cast on the audition. Another explanation why the mother of the main character looks much younger than her own daughter, I do not find. Or the holy father trying to help an “old” alcoholic is a twenty-year-old boy with dusty hair who is forced to play a 60-year-old character. He even moves and walks so ridiculously that it feels like a bad performance.
So, we get another idea about the family curse. Once upon a time, a great-grandmother made a deal with a demon - wealth in exchange for the firstborn in the family. Of course, the promise was not kept. And now, our time, and three adult children who survived mental trauma in childhood, have become parents themselves.
Family dramas make it difficult to look at the film through the prism of impartiality. We are shown dirty family linen, but they do not explain or justify the turmoil in the family. There is a drunken mother, a drug addict who meets a tyrant, and an overly religious man who has actually lost faith. As a result, it turns into an incomprehensible messivo, which not only prevents you from enjoying the viewing, but also in principle does not belong to the plot of the film. Given the scant translation, spend 70% of your time just trying to figure out who has relatives and why they hate each other.
The inaccessibility of the prison in which the monster is locked is so comical, to the point of absurdity (and it is based on the sacrifice of one of the relatives), that the first vagrant freely comes and opens the portal to hell. It would be funny if it wasn’t very sad.
The funny idea was to make the monster's weak spot sugar. At some points, the fairy kills characters with a toothbrush and tooth floss, that is, using dentistry as a weapon, and this is a pretty good allegory.
The main tragedy of this film is the absolute, under the blueprint, identity with the previous works of the director. All the same techniques are used here. Place, actors, idea, self-sacrifice techniques and even a non-trivial blogger who explains & #39; the legend behind the film. The endings of the films are absolutely identical in semantic content and execution of the idea, and even shot in the same room. In the negative, the narrative is very slow pace of events, which undoubtedly deprives the viewer of a certain amount of satisfaction. The antagonist is poorly designed - rags, a cheap mask under a cheap wig, he does not cause even a shadow of fear. To pay attention to some camera work, lighting, musical accompaniment and editing, I believe, makes no sense - the film looks like an amateur, unpretentious indie project.
Perhaps there is a hint of a comedy slasher in the film, or maybe I just thought. Overall, The Tooth Fairy is a film with all the drawbacks of previous Louisa Warren films. The people who made it didn’t want to or couldn’t learn (or weren’t smart enough to) from their mistakes – it was obviously easier and budget-friendly to shoot two identical pictures. After the end, you feel cheated, and you ask the question, was it worth it? Think about whether you want to spend time on it.
2 out of 10