Zero (Pawel Borowski, 2009): Poland

Reviewed by Charles Hedrick. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

I walked into the theater with extremely high expectations for “Zero“, because I had only heard good things about this film. However while I was walking out of the Metro 4 theater I was feeling extremely let down, not to mention extremely confused. The first issue with this film, this took me about half an hour to realize, is that the plot is impossible to follow (if there is one to follow that is). Another aspect of this film that made it hard to enjoy and hard to follow was the fact that no characters in the film had names. However, while there were massive irreversible problems with “Zero“, there were two good aspects of the film which were almost enough to save itself. The first being the amazing cinematography, and the second being the half decent acting.

The way the story of “Zero” was told, while the actual plot line was impossible to discern, was rather interesting. What I mean by this is that there were no random scene transitions, every single transition was done whenever a character interacted with another. For example when the character that the camera is following bumps into another important character the camera would then begin following the other character, and events such as this would make the camera change who it was following. The cinematography which was involved in this kind of transition was so smooth and incredible that I almost forgot how terrible the rest of the movie was. I am sure that the cinematographer of “Zero“, Arkadiusz Tomiak, will be seen in other films.

The actors and actresses of “Zero” range from mediocre to phenomenal. So regardless of whatever plot line these characters were trying to convey, I was at least able to believe that their characters could be real people. However the mediocre actors and actresses vastly outnumbered the phenomenal actors and actresses, this exceeding number of characters in the film was very detrimental, not only for the plot, but also for the phenomenal actors and actresses.  It was detrimental to the plot because of the fact that following over twenty-five characters just makes the plot that much harder to follow. The exceeding number of mediocre actors and actresses made it harder to really appreciate the phenomenal ones, because of the fact that the audiences attention would have to be pulled away from the phenomenal actors to pay attention to the mediocre ones.

Unless you are not in it for the story, or do not mind being confused, then I strongly advise you not to see “Zero“. However if you do not mind a terrible, intangible plot line, and only care about the cinematography, then “Zero” is definitely a must see. So the bottom line is that “Zero” is not for the average audience, but is a must see for hard core film buffs that can get past it’s abysmal plot line and can focus on it’s good aspects, such as the cinematography, and the occasional amazing actor or actress. However I am not such a film buff so I feel like I lost an hour and ten minutes of my life, and it is never coming back.