Trhlina

My biggest takeaway was that I learned about the Tribec mystery, which I had never heard of before. The authors unfortunately didn't provide much insight, I had to look up everything afterwards, which bummed me out. The story was extremely mysterious, and raised a lot of questions, but shrewdly left them unanswered. The acting performances were forced and unconvincing, the atmosphere didn’t work very well and all that hiking through the woods got a bit tedious at times. (29.07.2019)

Confused madness reaching almost parodic dimensions of the Slovak interpretation of the Blair Witch Mystery. I don't know if I perceived the film myself or if I slept or was awake and it was somehow the same - my thoughts were wandering elsewhere and the film was so confused that whether I missed five minutes or thirty, it didn't show in the end. (25.12.2019)

I'm sorely tempted to defend this, because up to a point I recognize Bebjak as a smart genre director who at last is no longer trying to follow up on something that's already died eight times and been dug up again seven times. But in The Rift he clearly struggled not only with the original assignment of making a three-part series (why on earth and whose idea was it?), which makes the first third deviate from the rest of the plot with an etude in a haunted madhouse that suffers terribly from bad sound, but also from budget and time constraints. Then, when a quartet of horribly acted and altogether shallow characters venture into a sparse, threadbare, leafy forest where they walk on a contour line, yammering the whole time about their inability to reach the summit, you kind of feel sorry for them all. Especially when you know by the exposition that we're going to see problems with diabetes, drug addiction, whistles, and who knows what else. It's a shame when the nature of the mystery is so reminiscent of the anomalies in the PC game Stalker, and perhaps the scene where the protagonist's girlfriend, whom he calls by a strange name, runs off into the darkness, while a strange spiral of lights circles somewhere in the back left of the frame, hinting at the promise of a mystery that the rest of the film is not capable of delivering. And in general, forest horror films are really not my thing. You can see a better example of how to make a lot of scares out of very little in the woods in Italy's Across the River. (07.08.2019)

The Rift is an unsuccessful attempt to make a mysterious horror movie such us those made primarily in Hollywood, where they know best how to do that. The film is marred by characters who are unattractive (in every sense of the word), a lengthy and uninteresting exposition, and an unsuccessful attempt at hackneyed tricks to create suspense when the characters are wandering through the forest. Bebjak is a good director and his The Line, which is much more complex in terms of the characters and story, was great. This type of genre flick, however, obviously requires a different kind of talent, and probably a better-adapted script that would not smack of a shoddy attempt to make quick money. (15.05.2019)

I can't say that it doesn't have the right unsettling atmosphere at times and that director Peter Bebjak doesn't try. Unfortunately, as a whole, The Gap is unnecessarily drawn-out, the characters are unconvincing, and it all resembles a mishmash of a good premise with seemingly developing motifs, the resolution of which is at least problematic. I understand that in this case, no clear conclusions can be expected in the narrative level (already considering the real circumstances of the case). Unfortunately, the biggest problem lies in the approach to processing the material itself, which seems chaotic and haphazard. [40%] (01.04.2024)