Ema (2019)

"The cinema of what-the-hell-did-I-just-watch uncategorisability has a new title for its pantheon."

"I couldn't quite shake the feeling... that the film was afflicted with a slightly pervy sheen."

"Normality consumed by chaos, and no one in sight - good films look relevant in the strangest times."

"Completely fresh and challenging, a coolly abstract vision of the modern family that pays subtle lip service to the film noir tradition."

"There is only defiance, a boldness that courses through every fibre of Di Girolamo’s being, through every stunning composition by Sergio Armstrong, and through Nicolas Jaar’s electrifying score... There's no one and no film quite like Ema."

"Sometimes the jagged edges of a narrative twisting and turning to find itself becomes a stretch: Ema is a mixed bag of delights..."

"Larrain is not bothered about social realism; his film is more like one of the heroine’s balls of flame, hurtling towards our comfort zones."

"A sublime fever dream..."

"With a pulsing, angular reggaeton soundtrack... the film throbs and leaps rather than walks."

"It is hard to like the characters enough, and their necessarily repetitive and stuck lives are not easy to stay with for nearly two hours."

"The key rewards of Ema are its slinky visuals. Longtime Larrain cinematography collaborator Sergio Armstrong's camera snakes around the actors with mesmerizing grace when it's not locked in monotonous face-forward close shots."

"The film, you see, has no story at all. It’s more like a randomized series of events, and what plays out during some of them is enigmatic enough to exist in a realm between reality and metaphor."

"While I confess that I found Ema to be a notch down on his best work, it’s still hugely distinctive and daring and may well be a grower."

"Larraín fills the screen with movement, his camera circling the actors as they cut loose."

"There are dense, delicious layers of poetry and physical language to sink your teeth into in Pablo Larraín’s incendiary drama Ema (his first since Jackie), in which the limits of human desire are stretched and tested."

"Mariana Di Girolamo gives an incredible breakout performance in a delirious film about a dancer trying to get back the son she gave away."

"Ema marks a fascinating inversion of Larraín’s prior film, Jackie, which concerned the pressures of having to filter one’s all-too-real grief through performative displays of propriety."