The Nameless (1999)

That was an excellent one.

hyped garbage

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

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.

I saw this movie several years ago with subtitles. It's a very dark and uncomfortable movie. I don't know that I loved it, but it was definitely interesting. However, I just watched it again and instead of subtitles, they dubbed the voices. OMG, it just ruins the whole movie. Shouldn't they be better at this by now?! It was like watching the old Japanese horror movies, like Mothra or Godzilla or Godzilla vs. Mothra (which BTW are campy fun). The dubbing was sooo bad that it was laughable. If you really hated this and were watching the dubbed version, you might want to try again with sub titles.

The Nameless is a pretty dark movie and deals with subject matter that a lot of people will find quite disturbing...the death of a 6-year-old girl. Apart from the opening scenes you don't see anything that bad, but it's the mere thought of child abuse that some people will find hard to stomach.The movie starts off pretty well, and immediately gets your attention by dealing with the death and mutilated body of the wee girl. We see the effects this has on the mother, Claudia (Emma Vilarasau), as she becomes addicted to tranquillisers and is working herself into the ground just to try and cope with the loss of her daughter even 5 years on.After Claudia gets a phone call from someone who claims to be her daughter, I actually thought it would start to pick up and get interesting, but unfortunately it doesn't really go anywhere. The story had so much going for it to be a really good psychological thriller but it's like it got to a dead end and struggled to find it's way again.The Nameless is extremely slow going and is kind of really all over the place as well. For instance, one minute you're watching Claudia looking in an abandoned building for her daughter, then it suddenly jumps to another scene dealing with another part of the story and with this happening, if you aren't paying attention, you will easily get lost. I know foreign movies have a tendency to do this, but it seemed more than usual with this film.The ending was a damp squib as well, and even if you are not completely lost by then you'll still just be left thinking "What the f**k was that all about?!" Overall, what started out to be a promising film actually turned out to be quite disappointing, especially as the director was the same person who made the very good REC and REC 2 movies.

The movie starts with a lot of promise. But it unfortunately meanders off without any logical flow. The main culprit is the story - I was hoping for a taut storyline but felt cheated with holes filled storyline. The story and directing are mediocre at best. The female protagonist is the only saving grace. I am not a big fan of the horror genre but I do love my share of thrillers, esp foreign. This, sadly, doesn't fit into either genre. I do want to give props to the background music. That helped me manage to keep invested in the movie to the very end. In summary, a disappointing and predictable venture. Go for it only if the alternate choices are badly made recent American flicks. If not, skip it.

Somehow, because of the success of movies like SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and SEVEN, some directors have jumped into the bandwagon and have come up with bad imitations of what psychological horror should be. Then again, maybe we should also blame H. P. Lovecraft for this as well, because a man who had a knack for creating pessimistic tales where unspeakable evils were unleashed in the name of Some Freaky God would eventually garner followers. And why not? People gravitate to what they relate to best. Lovecraft himself imitated Poe on several of his own stories, and Stephen King has reworked many horror classics without batting an eye.The thing is, not everyone can be as successful, and if you're going to create something our of a Lovecraftian universe (to mention a clichéd expression), it had better be truly horrific or it will be lost in translation. THE NAMELESS tells a story that visually starts out well but soon looses steam and ends up a complete mess. A girl is kidnapped and her body is found in a deep well, horribly burned beyond recognition. Only a physical deformity remains the identifying link -- one leg was four inches shorter. The mother grieves, her marriage soon disintegrates... and then, some time later, she receives a call. It's her daughter. She's alive.An interesting premise, but from here on the story becomes less and less horrific and more and more a by-the-numbers investigation which somehow never seems to involve the police (because of course, we need to place the heroine and the morally wounded cop back in the land of Fear). The fact that these two characters wind up where they do, and that the story unveils its bland denouement after so much build-up (with talks of "synthesizing" evil into some fantastic entity and a cataclysmic event, which winds up being a lot of mumbo-jumbo) is what makes THE NAMELESS fail: everyone moves according to plot requirement. If you're going to do a story that is supposedly that twisted, it had better drip conscious malice and make people squeamish. ROSEMARY'S BABY did just that in 1968 and nary a drop of blood to be seen. Hell (no pun intended), even THE OMEN, a rather mediocre movie about another Satanic plot, fares better. None of the "nameless" look particularly that dangerous, either -- little more than druggies who get their kicks smelling glue and cutting themselves to ease the pain. Would it that any of them could strike the menace that Mrs Baylock or those dotty Castevets did. Maybe Ramsey Campbell will like it. Assuming he understands Spanish.