Synopsis
An Italian movie crew goes to London to make a documentary about a murder case that took place a few years before.
The Protagonists
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Alternative Title
倫敦謎案
Releases by Date
Premiere
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Italy
Venice Film Festival
Theatrical
10 Sep 1999
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ItalyNR
Releases by Country
Italy
08 Sep 1999
- Premiere Venice Film Festival
10 Sep 1999
- TheatricalNR
Popular reviews
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Every time Tilda Swinton stared into the camera I could feel her piercing through my soul.
Half documentary, half fever dream cinematic recreation, this account of a brutal murder in 1994 London left a lot to be desired and the stylistic clash didn't work for me. The documentary half was quite bizarre (complimentary) as it felt like something a substitute teacher would throw on to watch during class but it was guided and delivered by Tilda Swinton.
Now that I am almost through Luca's filmography, I didn't realize that Tilda Swinton was his muse. Can we really blame him, though?
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Ryan Murphy romanticize your true crimes this avant-garde-ly challenge (f/jail).
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Now maybe I shouldn’t have watched this during the NFL draft.. but I don’t think it really would have improved my experience
35/100
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I woke up the morning after watching Luca Guadagnino's feature debut to headlines about the 'night watcher', a prolific burglar of large country houses whose stealth, violence and tactical planning are such that police suspect him to be an ex-soldier. It's an incredible true crime story, so incredible that I strongly suspect the BBC made the editorial decision to lead with pictures of his battered victims purely to try and prevent readers from seeing him as a Robin Hood figure. We all love true crime stories - Netflix's profit margins would look very different if we didn't - but few of us like to admit to that visceral tingle of reading about what Georg Büchner called "a great murder, a…
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I like it as a critique and deconstruction of the true crime genre — but doing that with a real case makes it guilty of the very thing it's responding to.
That said, it's still more interesting — and probably more ethical — than your average true crime doc/docudrama that contains no self-reflection.
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One of the absolute worst films I have seen since joining letterboxd. Luca Guadagnino's The Protagonists is quite simply immoral. It's ghoulish, poorly made, pretentious and lacking in substance. This film about a very real and recent murder case is completely vain and obsessed with its documentarians more than with the actual subject.
For the first hour of the film we follow them as they collect talking heads and create reenactments, they are always one step removed from the actual crime, using it selfishly as a template for their poor art experiment. They never try and approach the case in any human way.
In one telling scene Swinton interviews the victims widow, instead of showing us this in a straightforward…
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COVIDEODROME: A Quarantine Challenge
Number 7: A psychotronic true crime film.I can see why some might hate it, but Tilda Swinton and her eclectic, ever changing style of eyebrows essentially presenting an avant garde edition of Crimewatch is something that I am very much here for. Very 90s, very London, very experimental and very, very sad.
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Let's get one thing straight: This is definitely a bad film. But god is it a weird, insane film, is it a fucking bizarre mess of a film. It's completely inscrutable how both Luca and Tilda came to the conclusion that all the things they did with this project were not only ok and fine to do, but also, made sense and would be worth doing. It's the kind of film that makes you wonder how not a single person along the pipeline of it's creation ever stopped and said, "You know maybe this shouldn't be the way we're doing things." Especially for a first feature. The film spends its entire runtime dwelling on and making light of a murder…
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Imagine having Tilda Swinton for your little arthouse debut film.
Not sure what was Guadagnino’s intentions with this exactly but it’s short, I like the vibes and Tilda Swinton is amazing, so while I obviously didn’t love it, it didn’t bore as much as I was expecting.
Funny how many phenomenal modern directors began with a little arthouse film like this in the late 90s-beginning of the 2000s (Nolan, Villeneuve, Guadagnino…)