Out of Blue

A clichéd, predictable, tonally inconsistent mess

Somewhere in the universe two black holes collide - as heavy as stars, as small as cities, literally black (the complete absence of light) holes (empty hollows). Tethered by gravity, in their final seconds together the black holes course through thousands of revolutions about their eventual point of contact, churning up space and time until they crash and merge into one bigger black hole, an event more powerful than any since the origin of the universe, outputting more than a trillion times the power of a billion Suns. The black hol__es collide in complete darkness. None of the energy exploding from the collision comes out as light. No telescope will ever see the event.

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Part murder-mystery, part esoteric cosmological rumination, part metaphysical neo-noir, Carol Morley's Out of Blue is a complete shambles. That this is so gives me no pleasure at all, as I'm a big fan of both Dreams of a Life (2011) and The Falling (2014). Dreams, in particular, was a seismic gut-punch of a movie, beautifully made, and thoroughly sobering. I saw Morley do Q&As for both films at the Dublin International Film Festival, and I've always found her to be articulate and insightful, so I was really looking forward to Out of Blue. Loosely based on Martin Amis's 1997 novel Night Train, the film wears its influences very much on its sleeve, primarily Nicolas Roeg (whose son, Luc serves as a producer) and David Lynch. Obviously designed as a puzzle, the story only ever seems half-formed, as if we're seeing it through gauze. Mixing tones, themes, and styles, the film tries to be many things at once, but ultimately ends up being none of them; far too simplistic to be a fully realised examination of the nature of existence, far too predictable to be a whodunnit, far too clichéd to be a noir.

Set in New Orleans in an unspecified time period, th...

Near as I can figure just about everybody hates this movie. Clearly expectations based on the novel were not met. I almost feel badly about not hating it. Oh well.

I found the complex and subtle plot line to be intriguing, and I was therefore too caught up in the evocative camera work and the atmospheric soundtrack to count the mistakes and perceived lapses in judgment that others found. Yes, I could have done without the little bits of film clips they threw in repeatedly: the marble or whatever it was rolling on the floor, the red scarf, and so on. There was no explanation that I could see and perhaps deserved to be on the cutting room floor, so to speak. And the ending was a bit too ambiguous for me, which probably was what they were aiming for, so congratulations to them on that front.

The question of suicide vs. homicide reminds me of when I took philosophy classes in college and noticed how a few leading philosophers in the early days of science committed suicide, whether because they were addressing questions no one had thought about before, or uncovering uncomfortable answers, or some other emotional response to the deep investigation into the human condition. And I wonder, do physicists ride the same sort of emotional roller coaster as they delve closer to answers to the big questions of where the universe came from, or indeed, are there multiple universes?

So anyway, I found Out of Blue to be entertaining, intriguing and thought provoking with a subject matter you rarely see explored in theatrical films, so I forgave its cinematic transgressions in other areas.