“Doodlebug” Review
So, the title of this film was really misleading. I saw “Doodlebug” and thought that it was going to be another cute film, like last week. Boy was I wrong. I did really like the way that the eyes were put in the title in the place of O’s.
The first thing that struck me about the film itself was the feeling it gave me. It looked and sounded like an old horror film. Which, in a way, I guess it was - a film about the horror that our own mind can unleash upon us. The film was oddly silent - he knocks over a chair at the beginning and it doesn’t make a sound. Maybe this mimics the ability of the mind to block out the sensible world when its focusing so intently on something (blocking out the sanity when you’re going crazy?). Even though the character didn’t speak, we learned a lot of him and what he was going through by his facial expressions and body movements.
The part where the clock started ticking really loudly freaked me out, because sometimes when I’m stressed out or can’t sleep, that sound creeps into my head and its all I can hear and focus on. Creepy. And then the part where he throws the phone in the water to stop it from ringing - I think that really showed how far gone past sensibility he was. At the end, when he killed himself and then got killed by himself, I kept thinking of the book Metamorphosis, where the guy turns into a bug. Except this was the opposite. Killing the bug had driven him so crazy that it was killing him. (I think?) This film was really weird, but I liked it.
