Oriol Paul is still a full-time director

Mirage

"Mirage" is 128 minutes long. After watching the film, my first impression was that Oriol Paul should be a full-time director. Paul's film language is excellent. The overall dim lighting, the use of lenses, and the switching points of parallel editing all show that he knows how to shoot suspense films. In the film, Angel was mostly shot at an upward angle when he committed the murder. He was tall and burly in the picture and looked very violent. After being interrogated by the police and entering the police station, the shooting angle became a relative looking down, Angel looked very thin, and at the same time showed his inner unease. The cut points of the cuts are reasonable, leaving the suspense, or cutting away at the peak of the suspense. The styling changes on both timelines are nice. The set doesn't have a lot of room to play, but it still has to be praised. The opening shot of the film features an old TV with the news playing on it. So it was the props, not the lines, that reminded me of the importance of "time" in the story. The sound of the movie matches the genre of the movie, but it's not advanced. The thunder and soundtrack are sometimes too loud. As an audiovisual art, film can render atmosphere and express emotions through the combination of picture and sound, which is the advantage of film. But as a suspense film, I prefer to use the suspenseful elements of the story itself to drive the sense of horror, rather than the sound of surprise. The film is neat, whether it's the back-and-forth of the clock and rotating shots at the editing point, or the different plots of the same scene in parallel cuts.

But, unfortunately, Paul is a good director, not a good screenwriter. Paul is so desperate for structural integrity that he spoils the plot at the very beginning of the film. Conflicts provide motivation for character behavior, and actions drive the plot. Thinking from the creator's point of view, the story has a clear direction: Roy is back in a second timeline, and Nick can't die. So all Roy needs to do is find the adult Nick in the second timeline. Who is Adult Nick? When a prominent character recurs, there is no doubt that he is the crux of the story.

So in the subsequent plot where Nick lurks at the murder scene, I don't have the slightest worry, because I know he is still alive. The setting of the murder in the film is also not good enough. It is not uncommon for derailment, and the manslaughter among them is also predictable, otherwise, the scene of Angel falling to the ground will not be filmed. The plot is neat but very weak, resulting in insufficient suspense. If the story were a novel rather than a movie, it would be much more exciting. In fact, Paul can condense the length of the film through editing. For example, after the audience has understood the general plot and knew that Roy has traveled to a parallel time and space due to the butterfly effect, Paul is still describing this fact repeatedly through constant comparison. Roy just appears rushed for most of the film. For another example, when showing the false tenderness of the scumbag David, adding a sentence "Do you want to control me?" is completely meaningless, and even David's cheating can be removed. It can be seen from this that Paul, as a screenwriter, wants to talk about family and maternal love in addition to suspense and science fiction. At the family level, Angel and David both cheated, but the reasons are not explained, but the structural correspondence. Mother's love is the reason why Roy must return to the second timeline, and he has only mentioned it in one sentence. The emotions that Paul wants to describe are too weak in the film to be insignificant, but he is reluctant to delete them. Between structural integrity and emotional expression, Paul was unable to make a trade-off. In fact, you can cut out a lot of repetitive elements and spend more time describing the murder. Why is Nick Jr. so intrigued that he breaks into the crime scene in both timelines? Why did Roy stop Nick Jr.? Why is she acting so hoarse? The story stems from dying, and it also has a very far-fetched feeling. The plot distribution of the film is very inappropriate, and it is inappropriate to present it in the film, and the root of this problem is that Paul, as a director, influenced the screenwriting and editing. Although the film started with an idea from Paul, it should be left to an experienced screenwriter to build the entire story.

"Mirage" is a crime, suspense, and science fiction film. It wants to take into account all three types and has ambitions, but this film has not yet reached a high level.

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