Braid

My kids used the phrase “try hard” as a derogatory term in gaming. I never understood what it meant. Well, of course I want to try hard in a video game. If I’m not trying, I’m losing. Duh. But after watching Braid, I see how it can be used negatively. Every element of Braid feels forced and phony, a desperate attempt to appeal to “Real Cinema” types, to escape the shackles of genre and convention not with honesty but artifice. It wants to be A Serious Film. “Elevated Horror”, as I’ve heard it described. The kind of horror movie that is meant to win awards, get standing ovations at film festivals, and impress snobs. It’s a horror movie for people who call Halloween sleazy but think Malignant is artful. It’s fucking terrible is what it is. It’s not satisfied with being incoherent or obtuse. It stands, arms crossed, refusing to understand WHY it should make sense. It’s insists that you be impressed by its use of color filters, random switches from color to black and white like Natural Born Killers, unnecessarily convoluted angles, editing that forces you to read the Wikipedia summary to fill in the gaps, a trio of leads so abrasive they could reduce a redwood to sawdust in mere seconds, and a plot so incomplete you’ll double the movie’s runtime because of how often you’ll rewind it hoping you can make sense of something by watching it a second time. It insists upon all this, but it will not help you or guide you or ease you into it or do anything to endear itself to you. It expects all this freshman year film school bullshit to impress you because it impresses itself. It is a movie explicitly designed so that its fans can look down their noses at its detractors and sneer “you don’t GET IT”. Except we don’t WANT to get it, and we shouldn’t have to put in more work than writing a doctorate thesis to appreciate your movie. Complexity for the sake of it is not art. This is a movie that looked at Phantasm’s non-linear narrative and surreal, dream-like structure but didn’t understand that the movie still has to have some consistent threads. It looked at Natural Born Killers and aped its technical style without understanding why Oliver Stone made it that way. It took stories that take place in weird houses (House On Haunted Hill, 13 Ghosts, We Have Always Lived In The Castle) and only got out of it that the crazier the house, the crazier the movie. It sees the plot twists of movies like Shutter Island and The Sixth Sense and gets the idea that reframing the movie’s reality with twists is something you can do anytime, anywhere, and with great repetition, but not have them fill in the holes in the narrative (and in fact, make new ones). This movie is trying so hard to impress the wrong crowd and be the wrong thing. That condemns it to three failures; it is neither the thing it wishes to be, nor the thing it could’ve been, and that leaves it as what it is, and that is a frustrating, obtuse jumble of pretensions and high-minded nonsense.