Martin

I had hopes. The reviews for this were so positive. I was sure this would be a diamond in the rough, a hidden gem. Hell, it’s George Romero’s personal favorite of his filmography. George, I don’t mean to tell you you’re wrong, but if this is your favorite, I question your taste in everything. Martin (the movie) is about, duh, Martin. He’s moving to Pittsburgh to live with his elderly cousin for reasons never fully explained. Martin believes he’s an 80 year old vampire, and so does his fundamentalist cousin. He kills people and drinks their blood. His cousin’s granddaughter doesn’t agree at all, but thinks Martin is disturbed. The movie is about Martin fighting his urges and struggling to fit in with the world. Martin wants to be this deed, profound exploration of an outsider’s longing to fit in, while also being this meditation on how we process the monstrousness of humanity by digesting it through folklore. It is never smart enough to do either of these concepts any justice at all. The latter aspect is explored, I guess, by way of making Martin an otherwise unassuming dweeb and also a delusional murderer, but so do a ton of other movies and they don’t presume to be some intelligent reflection on the human condition. Never mind that the movie’s attempt at reflection is to follow around Martin being antisocial to the point where I wondered if he was just being contrarian and obtuse. Imagine if Holden Canfield wasn’t a sanctimonious asshole and more of a quiet loner. There’s Martin. Now spend 90 minutes with him. Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Watching him watch the world with skepticism and apprehension, being aloof to human contact for no adequately explored reason, mostly just blankly at people … it’s as fun as it sounds, which is to say not at all. As if the movie’s glacial pace wasn’t bad enough, there’s also the whole vampirism aspect, which the movie absolutely does not want to be clear on. I’m okay with ambiguity in a movie, but here, it does the movie a disservice. If he IS a vampire, the movie has demystified the idea of a vanpire and reduced it to a misanthropic man-child, and thanks movie, but Twitter is already full of those and I deleted my account to avoid them. There is nothing interesting about an incel vampire. And if he’s NOT a vampire, then he’s just murderous, delusional, self-absorbed turd of a person. In either case, he is miserable to watch. Thanks, I hate it. And you know who else is miserable to watch? Everybody else in the movie! The uncle is a cliche of Eastern European religious fundamentalism, believing in a familial vampiric curse, and expecting the local church to perform exorcisms on demand. The granddaughter is barely sketched out beyond “not religious” and “has a boyfriend”. There’s a housewife Martin has an affair with that’s sad about her life and that’s all you get. Everybody else is a prop. Everybody in this movie is either dreary, obnoxious, boring, or inconsequential. Why should I want to spend 90 minutes with this cast? Add in a confusing editing choice wherein black and white scenes that may be either memories or fantasies of Martin being a vampire in another time and place that get spliced into the action for no reason, and what that produces is a dull, monotonous movie with an unbearable cast of characters. I do not understand the high praise for this. I do not understand any praise for this. Unless you’re particularly sleepy and need a visual sedative.