Makeup guru Rose (Emma Jade), faces hate mail
graeaehorror
Makeup guru Rose (Emma Jade), faces hate mail from a rival artist following controversy after a beauty product she’s endorsing causes customers to develop…
Makeup guru Rose (Emma Jade), faces hate mail from a rival artist following controversy after a beauty product she’s endorsing causes customers to develop wounds on their faces. After falling into a toxic love spiral with Lily (Alyssa Anthony), Rose slides down a dangerous rabbit hole of drugs, paranoia and jealousy until she hits an unimaginable rock bottom.
This independent feature from writer/director Matthew Freiheit is a visual feast with lashings of neon, a great colour palette and striking imagery. The tone mirrors the story well, playing into the online false identities many of us see daily and our apparent obsession with striving for perfection and acceptance.
The movie has clear messaging behind its narrative, but the story is hard to decipher at times with various vignettes woven through the film making it a little hard to track where the story is heading. I feel this had a real opportunity to make a statement about the issues and messaging behind the story, but this falls slightly off the mark.
The film progressively becomes more psychologically damaging with some violent scenes as we’re set up for what should be a great climax. But instead of opting for a real showstopper, the film limps off with a series of social media screenshots and texts. The third act really misses the aesthetic flair a film of this nature could achieve, and I wonder if this could have been due to limitations outside of the filmmaker’s control.
Overall Iconic is a great watch for the visuals and perhaps a younger viewer than I would find some relatability with the main character. This is definitely a director to keep your eye on as there are some great fundamental ideas and I'm excited to see them hone their craft further.
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★ 1 / 10
kannibalcorpsegrinder
Living in Los Angeles, a beauty influencer trying to get over a scandal in her career, meets a woman who soon steers her into a bizarre world of madness…
Living in Los Angeles, a beauty influencer trying to get over a scandal in her career, meets a woman who soon steers her into a bizarre world of madness, obsession, and psychosis as she starts a downward spiral not just in her career but in her sanity, the more they stay together.This was a mess of a film that has a few redeeming qualities. One of the only positive factors here is the way this one starts to showcase the fractured sanity and mindset that develops in the film. Starting with her already on edge due to the initial controversy that she faces with her rival being disfigured over a regiment that she promoted only to forgo any kind of public apology, the stalker who's threatening to get ever closer to her, and the general state of the world she lives in, there's a great opening point that allows the downward spiral to come about naturally. The more she gets involved with the seedy figures in the world around her, the more her degenerate status and mindset affect what she does, seeming genuinely and openly appropriate. By the time everything comes to the forefront and it features the whole comeuppance angle at the end, providing some bloody deaths, all of which give this some enjoyable elements. Aside from this, there's little about this one that seems to be worthwhile. The most egregious factor in this one is that there's just nothing interesting about the universe being presented here, and it's insanely difficult to care about anything. With the opening painting her as a callous, uncaring, and just plain obnoxious millennial beauty influencer who's terrible at her job, never makes any interesting content, and spends her life trying to partake in that lifestyle, it becomes an uphill battle to remain invested in her or her plight by the five minute mark before anything starts happening. As nothing is particularly glamorous or appealing about the drug-infused lifestyle her friends get her into, not even the downward spiral has any stakes, with it seemingly obvious what's going on and nothing to be gained from getting her hooked on the lifestyle. That all makes for a distressing and generally underwhelming feature.Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language, Violence, Nudity, drug use, and sex scenes.
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★ 9 / 10
One of my favorite movies I have seen this year
adamsilword-29503
Anyone who has been in the scene of drug use and ego-trip will recognize a lot of the distortion one might experience going through it. The main character rose…
Anyone who has been in the scene of drug use and ego-trip will recognize a lot of the distortion one might experience going through it. The main character rose is just stunningly beautiful, and her insanity is just as capturing as her looks. The personalities in this movie is not fiction, I have met many of them, and the fact that it is accepted largely and recognized even as attractive to live this kind of lifestyle, by many, is what makes this movie so brutal and good at the same time, because even though this movie might be oversaturated in its emotion for some, for many this is close to reality, a reality that they can't escape easily and without much inner work and change of circumstances. Great choice of characters, music, visuals and so on. The messages is beautiful, although not displayed well enough.
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80%
AUDIENCE
4.0/10
582
