Grand Piano

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Tyler

Eugenio Mira made one of my favourite real time single location thrillers with criminally under-seen The Birthday a few years back (with Corey Feldman's best performance ever) and he's made another here, with an even more outlandish premise and a great cast too. And boy does he put ALL the direction into this movie. All of it. Brian DePalma eat your heart out. 

The limited setting is like a personal challenge and we are treated an onslaught of different camera angles and movements and cinematic tricks and techniques to keep the pace up and the storying moving forward. It's kind of dizzying. 

What lets the film down is something that might not be a problem to anyone who's never been to a concert before. But really, that's not how concerts work, that's not how pianists perform and that's not what a difficult piano recital piece would sound like. I'm sure people at NASA would watch Gravity and think very simmilar things, you have to have some suspension of disbelief to be able to tell your story, but there are some pretty big problems with this premise that they have to change things as much as they do to make it work and it does annoy the piano recitalist in me. 

And if you're going to make a story about the hardest piano piece to play, you'd better have the hardest piano piece to play or not let the audience hear it. 

However the movie is just fun enough for me to be able to overlook that. It's really flashy directing but it really suits something like this and definitely worth a look, even if it was just for that.