Watch The Convent For Free

Excellent but underrated film

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Two stars for fairly competent cinematography. Good composition and good camera movement without glitzy focus-racking thru the forest.Malkovich and Deneuve are there only for their names. The real acting takes place with the Porteguese? actors. And they struggle with the pretentious dialog.The two worst offenses are committed by the director who explains the characters and their actions thru narration ( or awkward scenes with minor actors describing the main characters by using some vaguely occult terminology) rather than showing their characters and motivations thru their actions and their own dialog. It is a movie, after all, not an essay. Second offense is the music, which is overwhelming at times. Using Stravinsky with violent string passages to imply evil, danger, foreboding etc could work, but it didn't for this production. Just loud and annoying without any real matching action.It reminded me greatly of a university master's thesis film I worked on 37 years ago--(fortunately not mine). Lots of fantasy, lots of literary allusions, lots of mood, pointless scenery long shots, more than a few long takes that the director fell in love with and the editor was not inclined (or allowed) to abbreviate, and some really over-the-top acting moments (as when Baltar meets the prof's wife for the first time). Down, boy, down! I rented it because I am trying to catch up on some Deneuve films that I missed over the years, but I'm sorry I did. She must have really needed some money to have done this one.

A seventeen year old could do this at home. Here's how:Take the most low-rent, brain-dead Hollywood teenage Satan-worshipper slasher flick you can imagine. Now: edit out the teenagers, edit out the violence, edit out the gore, edit out anything remotely suspenseful or titillating, and replace it all with quotes from Goethe and Nietzsche. Now,take it all very seriously and say you have an art film.I guess if you are eighty-five instead of seventeen, someone in Europe will give you a prize. Sort of a sympathy award for a crazy old uncle.Everything about this movie except for a few shots of the Iberian countryside is appallingly bad. The script has to be the laziest and most inept I have ever encountered outside of a community college classroom. Who knows what Malkovich and Deneuve were thinking if they actually read it before agreeing to make this film (assuming there ever was actually a script that could be read). Who knows what they thought when they saw the rushes. In fact, my theory about the ending is that all the actors (except the fisherman, I guess) simply abandoned the project in exasperation, walked off the set, and never came back. It's that ludicrous and incoherent.And the Shakespeare theory that is supposedly the inspiration and impetus behind this entire trainwreck...to call it lazy, sophomoric, and stupid is to give it more substance and development than the movie ever bothered to.Funniest, most unintentionally hilarious moment? When Deneuve tells "Baltar" (I'm not making that name up) how magnetic and irresistible he is. Only a great actress could have done that without needing oxygen almost immediately.

This film was just too mysterious at times and, even though I found it super provocative and ultimately, worthwhile: the end had me laughing out loud -- and I'm sure that wasn't the intended effect. I'm curious to know what others think:Does the professor actually make a visit to Piedad's room? Or is it a dream, as she describes? How do you read the professor's reaction when she describes her vision? "I should stay far away from this lunatic." or "She and her delusions are sooo hot." -- are a couple of options.How to interpret Piedad's flight into the forest -- is she doomed to fall prey to desire, does this demonstrate the flaw in "goodness"?What other movies by this director would you recommend? Are there similarities among them?

I consider myself a rather weird individual myself, I see strange foreign and art films, I read a lot on history and classics. Yet when I saw this film I oculdn't stop wondering what in the world was happening. I understand the metaphysical aspects of the film, even the Faust influence, but to me it lacked something central. The acting was great from Deneuve and Malkovich (Loved Shadow of a Vampire), but some other actors were a bit too fake, too overly dramatic. Yes, the cinematography is gorgeous, it makes me feel rather odd and at the same time its beauty is alarming. I think that it is actually an okay film that needs a better score and a more developed plot. A good but not phenomenal film. I have seen better movies concerning this idealogy, not many but a handful.