The Safety of Objects

This was a brilliant film, and definitely one of my favourites, not only because it was deeply moving, but because it was an exploration into some of the darkest parts of humanity- guilt, regret, boredom, routine, and primarily, the fixations that people develop with the little possessions that they surround themselves with.

From the young boy with a sexual attachment to his little sister's doll, to the commercially exploited lawyer whose family has nearly forgotten him at home with the baseball glove, stolen from a department store, which brings back memories of a time when he wasn't shackled to a corporate system that had just recently fucked him over for a promotion.

And what about the man who kidnaps a young girl, hoping that her short hair and tomboyish behaviour might fulfil his sorrowful fantasy of having a little brother again? Or the mother who tends to her comatose son night and day, pale-faced, intent on the worthless hope that one day he may open his eyes?

The Safety of Objects is by no means a happy movie, and its presentation with bright colours and neat suburban blocks serve to heighten the sense of disillusionment and neurosis that are so prevalent in the characters which make the movie so effective. Never before has there been a movie that better represents the underlying presence of suburban paranoia and confusion than this one, and although it is incredibly depressing, it is among the ranks of other indictments of modern society such as American Beauty, and could very well be the one movie that twenty-first people need to see. In a society where the physical, the material, is beginning to have more relavance to people's lives than moral worth and ethical conduct, this movie shows us the desolate future of a completely corporate, commercialised society.

Liam gives this movie 9/10.

Liam Blackford