Directed by:
Ondřej SokolCinematography:
Tomáš SyselComposer:
Jan P. MuchowCast:
Ondřej Sokol, Martin Finger, Jana Krausová, Karel Roden, Jaroslav Plesl, Zuzana Stavná, Andrea Daňková, Ondřej Malý, David Matásek, Michal Suchánek (more)Plots(1)
Michal and Adam are childhood friends coming back to their hometown after 20 years. Michal's mother has been dead for several years and Michal's father dies onthe day they return. The only thing that's left is the feeling thatsomething bad has happened, the anger, the sadness without knowing thetruth. Father's new wife (now a widow) behaves suspiciously, whichencourages Michal and Adam to try to find out more. They decide to get tothe bottom of the mystery. The wheels of unstoppable disaster are turningfaster and faster. Life is never black and white. And shades of grey arehard to solve... (official distributor synopsis)
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Reviews (3)
The Lake reminded me a lot of the Danish crime comedy Old Men in New Cars: In China They Eat Dogs. It’s a pity that Martin Finger and Ondřej Sokol are at times more theatrical than authentic. Often, they turn the film into a farce, when it is definitely not supposed to be that. The atmosphere is excellent, the story has a good pace, the city of Šumperk is appropriately gloomy and the dialogues are sometimes truly excellent. Sokol really shines through the movie. However, for his next project I wish he would be more honest as an actor and wasn’t aiming for so much drama, which was often excessive in his character. Way too often I saw his own personality as we know it from Partička and that affected the movie quite significantly. Other than that, the actors like Ondřej Malý, Jaroslav Plesl, Karel Roden or Zuzana Stavná prove that this movie is not that bad and is definitely worth watching.
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It's an attempt at a gritty but comedic crime plot, but it doesn't quite come together. It's quite drawn out, the acting performances aren't anything great, and above all, it's not as funny as one would expect. Some characters are clearly given certain scenes at the expense of the story just to entertain. But I still don't regret contributing to the campaign. No one will notice my name in the credits anyway.
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A classic local shapeless mess, which squints at "rougher paragons" (I would call it a Czech attempt to create a black comedy drama like Terribly Happy), but then it dissolves into inconsistent templates. Here we find typical techniques from the bad comedy (Sokol's hero, his self-deprecating and self-pitying humor), certain signs of reflection on family crisis and alienation (Finger's cold declamation), an extravagant thriller (mechanical smearing of various glaring signs on familiar acting faces - gay, undertaker and assassin Roden), a clever effort to create an absurd fateful chaining of events (the dog in the car)... instead of a dense, cynical and exciting spectacle, but The Lake is more reminiscent of ambitiously framed scenes from ribbons, which last an unreasonably long time, are cheesy and without a good point. A typical goulash from the local film station, sparse, full of flavorings and boiled ambitions. In addition, it disguises its dramaturgical helplessness as "genre openness", the impotence of which is best reflected in the indecisive soundtrack by Jan P. Muchow, who languidly irons possible emotional organs into an indifferent badge (the music cannot be described as instructive because it leads nowhere). One then notices a thoughtless series that reveals how persistently the individual situations are mashed together so that the screenwriters can get them to some sort of point. However, it smells of typical post-revolutionary exploitation, which stems from pure clumsiness rather than thoughtfulness / foresight. [40%]
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Gallery (54)
Photo © Dalibor Silný
![The Lake - Photos](http://image.pmgstatic.com/cache/resized/w663/files/images/film/photos/158/183/158183259_2a36c1.jpg)
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