Soho Square (2000)

Who payed the critics

Lack of good storyline.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Unlike the Anglophobic negative reviewers who've spewed their venom all over SOHO SQUARE earlier, I will offer a comment on the basis of having watched the whole movie TWICE (the second time with rookie director Jamie Rafn's solo commentary, which is just as succinctly intelligent as the film he made). I easily rated this a 7 after my first viewing, and was only intending on following the director's commentary for five minutes, but Rafn had me hooked for the a 77-minute repeat which was better than deja vu. In the interest of full disclosure, my wife just watched this once and gave it a 4, but I think she only rated MEMENTO 5 or 6 at best. It is galling to see some of the same people who probably degraded this neo noir novella of a flick elevate artsy fartsy crap like Steven Soderbergh's equally experimental SCHIZOPOLIS to a 7.2 average. After all, with a quarter-million dollar budget, much of Hollywood, and an actual nationwide release aiding him, Steve still lost 96% (!) of his working capital on that misbegotten mishmash (going by the sub-$11K U.S. box office). Brownie points should not be heaped upon excruciatingly boring pretentious BS simply because someone is afraid they are too dumb to "get" it!Anyway, aside from the thriftiness of miracle-worker Rafn's $10K total expenditure, a knowledgeable viewer would think there's MORE money being spent here than meets the eye, even given an AVERAGE direct-to-video filming budget. (If you do a quick survey of these sort of titles on IMDb, you'll see they run about a million bucks each.) What the director has done is to use his extensive knowledge of location possibilities in England generally (and London, in particular), plus a lot of friends in right places, along with a canny knowledge of what can and cannot be done with his resources, to milk two thousand per cent more entertainment from his material than Soderbergh did four years earlier with his. Couple this with Rafn's Mac editing wizardry, with a nod to an equally experimental, dissonant soundtrack from Chris Read that perfectly fits the images on-screen, and you end up with something I enjoyed more (at least on a minute-by-minute basis) than the ENGL1SH PATIENT. I've viewed a dozen directorial debuts in the past month, and this is by far the most promising.

I'm a circumspect edgy guy, but Jesus, I thought this thing would never end. The film was put together surprisingly well on their budget, but the plot was thin, very thin. When the big "surprise" ending came, I was like...so what? There was no real tension. It was flat the whole way through. If Hitchcock would have made this film, that ending would have been on about page 10 or 20 and the detective would have spent the rest of the film trying to hide facts from his coworker(s), the girl and her mother. If writer/director was not going for the Hitchcock effect, I apologize. The problem is, I couldn't figure out what impact this film was suppose to have on me. Sorry.The music was very cool. Multi-layered. Creepy. That's why I gave this film a 3.

From the information posted on IMDb's site I gather this is an opera prima and if so, we might be in presence of a talent to reckon with. The interview with the director included in the DVD clearly shows a person in his twenties, ready to show what he learnt and is capable of.Yes, the first half hour or so is confusing -maybe deliberately so- but I'd say the plot is cleverly exposed and handled. And the way things turn out to be and how the particular murder the film begins with fits into the series of killings the plot centres on is smartly devised. I concur with others, commenting the movie on this website, on the unresolved issue of the neighbour mum and daughter, perhaps a more seasoned film maker would have taken care of that more adroitly; yet a case could me made towards the transposition of the detective's wife and unborn child and hence the attention he gives these otherwise peripheral characters. Criticising slowness in plot progress in European films is common in this side of the Atlantic and it's really no big deal. They make their films evolve at a given pace, US and (some) Latin American film makers prefer a different one, it's a question of personal preference.But in sum, let's follow the work of this young Englishman, for he seems a promising talent.

"Soho Square" is a British drama which follows a troubled homicide detective as he sorts through personal issues while working on a serial killer case. An unfortunate piece of work, the only redeeming thing I could find between the credits of this flick was the shorter-than-usual 78 minute run. A choppy mess of poorly lensed and poorly edited scenes with horrible color and music, "Soho Square" seems to be an attempt at art house fare which just went wrong. The story is muddled and confused and sorts itself out only when it's too late to care. Character depth is superficial, nothing scenes are dragged out for no apparent reason, plot holes are everywhere....I could go on...and on. However, suffice it to say, this film is not recommendable. I happened to rent it mail order by mistake and only stuck with it because it was in English and I could type these comments while it was running. (C-)