Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life (1995)

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

This is one of those films that sort of rides the line of being either painfully pretentious or enchantingly magical. Depending on the person you are, you'll either hate it for being "an artsy-fartsy self handjob of pretension and bullsh*t symbolism that doesn't make any goddamn sense", or love it for being a beautiful, surrealistic little fantasy. I belong to the latter group of people, not because I am a pretentious hipster or anything like that, but because I enjoy travelling to other worlds, and this film allowed me to do so. It has beautiful cinematography and an enchanting, yet bizarre and gloomy setting filled with quirky characters, fascinating sets, and painful tragedies. The performances are also quite excellent, especially those of the two leads, Mark Rylance and Alice Krige. Their performances both brilliantly convey their characters dry, emotionless states as well as their dramatic, emotionally heavy ones.The film also has a great sense of humor despite being so dreary. The humor is mostly present in the first half of the film, in which many of the best sequences are thrown at the audience with an entertaining passion. The humor is all dark and absurd, much like the tone of the film itself. It is always due to a little, zany quirk in a character's movement, tone, facial expression, etc. It gets awkward and weird to a point of hilarity.This film is essentially "Eraserhead", but all of the horrific elements are replaced with more poetic and dramatic elements. It works exquisitely well, and the Brothers Quay did a great job adapting their style to feature length cinema. Their surreal world is wonderful to dive into!

it is really beautiful. fragile, cold and courageous. because it is little more than art film. or adaptation. it may be a dream fresco, a puzzle or a form of poem. it is special meeting with a delicate meeting front with profound world in which Expresionism art, Kafka lines, Surrealism and Oniric circles are frontiers of this work. crumbs of magic, dark questions confuse desires, memories from past for East European people and shadows of characters. and flavor of many nuances of acting. paper ash colors, gray feelings and strange forms of life. a parable about basic values and hole of emotions. version for a Gloomy Sunday and exploration of a trip without end.

It is fairly rare that moving pictures are made with real artistic value in mind and even more rare when the endeavor pays off. Well, The Quay brothers' Institute Benjamenta is one such picture. At first sight it might appear a little too pretentious with an abounding array of hidden symbolism of a strange and antique meaning but then again, the basic thread of the picture is as old as humanity itself, pointing back to the ancestral roots of what makes us human: to love and to loose. It is remarkable the technique and the rendering of the camera in the Quay brothers' masterpiece. You cannot but help wondering if the images themselves are not centuries old and, in a sense, that is exactly the aim of the picture, to make itself look old and timeless, at the same time. I urge anyone who is really looking for that special feeling films give us, far from commercialism and hollywoodia, to see this movie. Sure, most of you will find it a little bit hard to watch but if you give it patience and let the mood of the picture fill you from within your imagination then I think this will be a rewarding cinematic experience.

A quiet and softly spoken man arrives at a ghostly building to enrol for the servants class taught there. He rings the doorbell and is greeted by a monkey's face through the small hole in the door. The man's name is Jakob. He enters and meets one of the two owners (a brother and sister). The brother is unpleasant, and informs Jakob that there are no favourites here. Jakob goes into class to meet the other students. They all announce their names to him and then fall over. The lessons are presumptuous and iterative. They involve the men swaying from side to side and standing on one leg. They really are quite eccentric. The institute seems to be its own little world away from reality, with its low ceiling rooms. The sister soon has a strange fondness for Jakob. This is a very sombre film, but has a unique air to it. The pacing is pedestrian, but you stay with it. The acting is good, and the camerawork is meticulous and probing.