Based on true events, Bartosz M. Kowlaski's Playground is quietly disturbing experience, a film which wields a cold, surgical precision in its observational study of child violence and the quiet escalation of brutality which can manifest itself in the impressionable minds of youth. Presented in a series of interconnected vignettes, Playground profiles two young boys and a young girl on the morning of the last day of school in a small Polish town, presenting each of them in their home life before their stories converge. Observational in approach, but lacking the nuance and grace to be something truly profound, Playground is a film which delivers a haunting, borderline dehumanizing story but never does much when it comes to attempting to grapple with understanding causes of such brutality, only serving up half-baked platitudes which aren't thoroughly presented or explored. Perhaps this is the intention, with the filmmaker absolute in his intention to not pretend one can fully grasp such horror, but the film at times provides subtle suggestions related to parental detachment and coercive pop-culture influence, never going far enough in the exploration of these ideas. One should be forewarned, the finale of Playground features one of the most disturbing scenes committed to celluloid this year, one in which the filmmakers present with maturity and craft. Without going into too much detail about this truly haunting finale, lets just say that the filmmakers themselves keep their lens at a distance, using a long lens, static composition, unable and unwilling to present such a scene in much detail, cognizant of not wanting to be exploitative in the slightest, with the filmmakers themselves visually expressing their own inability to fathom such brutality. .
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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