Holiday

[wilder]

A love triangle featuring the trophy girlfriend of a petty drug lord, caught up in a web of luxury and violence in a modern dark gangster tale set in the beautiful port city of Bodrum on the Turkish Riviera.

Directed by Isabella Eklöf
Written by Isabella Eklöf and Johanne Algren
Release Date - February 8, 2019, DVD on March 19, 2019

Note: The streaming and VOD versions of this film are censored, while the DVD is uncut

This isn't playing REVENGE's tantalizing genre games, it's not IRREVERSIBLE's descent into Hell. Closer to ELLE but guts you with its patient austerity as opposed to Verhoeven's excited provocations. This'll be sticking with me.

Were '18 to end today, Holiday may very well rank as my #1 movie of the year, for the simple reason that I haven't been able to shake the troubling feeling it left me with since first seeing it in January. Isabella Eklöf's cold, precise, detached tale of a gangster's mistress – Victoria Carmen Sonne, delivering a freshman performance that's absolutely devastating – who learns what it means to become an object (and how she chooses to live with that fact) could have never been made by men. Because Eklöf – who also co-wrote the outstanding modern fairy tale, Border, which NEON is distributing later this year – is making a movie about a woman coming to terms with becoming a literal product, to be used and disposed of as her keeper sees fit, and never judges her once for it. The level of clinical examination is downright Cronenbergian in its amorality, treating this concubine like a test subject in the most gorgeous lab possible (the beautiful port city of Bodrum on the Turkish Riviera).

Unusually insightful about the ways women are conditioned to play nice and put on our people-pleasing personas even as terrible things are done to us, and about the ways anger can be misdirected when it's too risky or destabilising to confront the underlying reason for it.

At no point did I feel unsympathetic towards the main character's point of view, and I was pissed off about a question in the Q&A that assumed the film deliberately set out to mess with audiences' feelings towards her and how likeable she was (FFS).

Interesting to hear Isabella Eklöf talk about the poster and how it deliberately makes the film look sexier and implies a revenge narrative that doesn't actually exist. The way the film treats the aftermath of sexual violence is far more disturbingly realistic than any rape-revenge scenario that could have played out.

[jenkins]

i want to see it

[Alethia]

Seconded.

[wilder]

European Drama 'Holiday' Bought by Breaking Glass
November 2, 2018
via Variety

Breaking Glass Pictures has acquired North American rights to Isabella Eklof's drama "Holiday" in a deal the closed during the American Film Market in Santa Monica, Calif.

Breaking Glass CEO Rich Wolff and Ioanna Stais of Heretic Outreach made the deal. "Holiday" will arrive in theaters in February, with a DVD/VOD release to follow.

[wilder]

In theaters February 8, 2019, DVD on March 19, 2019

[wilder]

February 24, 2020

Uncut, region free, limited edition UK blu-ray from Anti-Worlds