The Novice

The Novice-480P

source: The Novice

Captivating and the acting is amazing. The perfect mix of drama, thriller, and enough levity to avoid being too dark. The plot is great, but the acting elevates it to another level.

Not bad, but disapoint by last chapter. The main actress looks and feel too old a times for the role of a student . Script needed some rewrite/polish . Just warcged Wolf 2021 , much better overall. Some will like this movie, but do not come in hoping thrillers style moments and resolutions, none of this here.

There seem to be a lot of fake reviews here. This really isn't a thriller at all, but a cheap girl coming of age B-movie. It doesn't have much plot except a overly ambitious girl trying to make it in the rowing sports. It's obviously an alter ego of the producer and writer of this movie trying to make it in the film industry. I say a cheap b-movie because it works with the cheapest imaginable tricks of all B movies to create drama and effect: Real live animal cruelty and animal torture. Several live crabs were slowly immersed into boiling water to produce this movie. Unless you have a thing for animal cruelty, you should not watch this. If you do, you will support animal cruelty in movies. Shame on the producer and director / writer who's obviously no less ambitious than the girl in the story, only she puts animals and their well-being on the line instead of herself. The movie seems filmed alright, but I don't know if that's a good thing when what's filmed is real-life animal cruelty.

I got tired really fast of the obsessive little girl trying too hard to be good at everything, the writer/director just shoves it down your throat, over and over. Cut scenes and we hear a mantra repeated over and over as it goes on in this character's head. Ok, we get it. That doesn't mean making the audience hear endless chants makes for a good film. All in all we never really see her actually row that much, it's all close ups of faces full of beading sweat, before and after scenes and mindfulness with OCD. Not much action, a few lesbian scenes which is almost a requirement for films featuring athletic women, and a piss poor ending. When a writer becomes the director is usually turns into a vanity project and this is no different. There is no point and no character arc to the story, more like a day in the life stretched to a full year.

6/10 - I was really anticipating this coming-of-age drama about college rowing and despite standout performances from Isabella Fuhrman, Dilone, and Amy Forsyth, this felt a little repetitive and underwhelming.

Isabelle is wonderful as usual; I will watch any movie she's in no matter how bad it may be, because she always manages to elevate her character above the material and does so in this case as well. The film is more reminiscent to me of Personal Best (1982) than Black Swan (always amazing how one person will mention a film everyone has seen and then they all have to mention it as well, no matter how wrong it is). What did not work for me was not that the usual tropes were unusually absent but that the total affect of the film was a bit flat. Not the actors' faults, every performance was effective, but I feel the director let them all down because any tension, conflict or even continuity wasn't followed through to any natural conclusions. An interesting film, but ultimately not satisfying despite the performances.

A queer college student joins her school's crew team and throws herself into the accompanying obsessive lifestyle with unnerving abandon. The movie is mostly repetitious inserts and and sound cues that are meant to illustrate the student's thought process as she puts her body through the grueling ordeal of becoming a successful crew team member even though its apparent she is not terribly good at the sport. It becomes obvious that this isn't a movie about rowing but a movie about someone with a problem that they're trying to fix by obsessively molding themselves into an athletic lifestyle. That's the movie's real puzzle that is never explored or explained: who is this girl? Why is she driving herself to such insane lengths to be something she's not? Regardless, the movie is fascinating and beautifully made. Its kind of a deconstruction of strange behavior.

With some deja-vu of "Whiplash", "the Novice" is not as interesting or focused, and isn't propelled by an outstanding Oscar Winning performance. Still it has some things going for it - enough that it holds its own. Lead Isabelle Fuhrman does a sold job and her obsessive character is driven to a fault of some destructiveness. Her character is sometimes self-loathing, ultra-focused, and impatient. The romance adds some depth. The movie is around high-6 or 7/10.