The opposite is true: With this sentence, self-reliant magical thinking contradicts clumsy everyday beliefs such as “ATMs are easier to crack than souls” or “a voodoo doll knows less than a human being”.

Dietmar Dath

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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In "Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon", a film of archetypal and primal magic thought out with rare consistency, a girl escapes from a psycho prison where, as the Germans say, she was "cared for" (that is to say: verbal abuse, beatings on the back of the head, humiliation) and discovers something the audience initially mistakenly thinks they already know: reality.

Mona Lisa, that's the girl's name (one thinks: because the young woman is a picture, then one hears singing and understands: no, she's a song), can make herself a model for her pursuers and then remotely control them with gestures or a breath of thought ;

a spell of counter-violence, rebellious spell.

This supernatural power, images suggest, stems from the wilderness, the steamy, damp darkness that surrounds New Orleans, where the black frogs croak.

But the city beckons with neon and snacks (sometimes you have to kiss the owner to get the munchies, Mona Lisa is a quick learner and does it like a lizard: with an ice-cold tongue).

Jeon Jong-seo plays the fugitive with panic sweating on her forehead and eyes who have seen more deranged wonders than ten films like this could fit.

The rest of the ensemble at least does halfway justice to the glow of this fantastic young witch actress with more or less flickering backlash: Kate Hudson plays a stripper (and single mother) named Bonnie, with exorbitant fingernails and an even more pointed tongue, Evan Whitten embodies her young son as an infectious performance of early puberty Dizziness that twitches to heavy metal music so precisely that the sound could also be left out, and Craig Robinson as the law-abiding but soft-hearted black security service provider plays the out-of-balance personified night watchman state so annoyed that the laws don't just guard him ,

but also want to have it written straight away.

Finally, Ed Skrein as the cute drug dealer "Fuzz" ("they call me fluff because I'm so soft and furry") does his interlude job laudably unpretentious as a cheap cross between James Franco and Ethan Hawke.

This character's stoned approach to the heroine painlessly fades into oblivion after a few semi-risky niceties.

With David Lynch or Paul Schrader it would quickly have become exhausting;

but if there is something like a female, perhaps better: emancipated (namely: less interested in erotic questions in dominance and resistance than in equal play) view, the director Ana Lily Amirpour shows here how unexpectedly deep it can look into people : dizzy, cute, beautiful.

Scary Tadpoles instead of Scary Toads

Is this all a horror movie?

Could be, there's enough black-crusted violence in it, stinking swampy issues (Oh God, what's going to happen to the kid now?) and hysterical heart palpitations.

But it's all much less about a spun, nebulous moonstruck idea of ​​maturity that Mona Lisa has to fight for, which is why there is never a really disgusting scary toad for the audience to swallow despite all the spooky things, but at most a few little abominable burbots.

An idiosyncratic film like this, which uses the camera sometimes as a hunting weapon and then again as a getaway vehicle, naturally alternates between dodging and escaping.

In addition, however, Ms. Amirpour suggests reading the possible "that was close" situations as different spellings of the idea "almost encountered".

Two people can act at the same time in different places in close coordination and in unison and vice versa, even where they directly share breathing air, completely miss each other, existentially turned away from each other.

In the dim light of such considerations, a realism emerges in “Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon” that does not (like the dry, vulgar-realistic formula “be reasonable!”) advise us to submit to what is given, but to break out of it with it reason that most social situations are formed by people who are, in a sense, always "not quite there" and so could be ignored rather than allowed to be trapped, imprisoned and trained by them.

Once an attempt is made to calm down the heroine by putting her in front of the television.

News sources and other media (from the state to the private to the so-called "social") are known to spread nothing better than the incapacitating claim that the theater of the aimless rulers, the political clowns and business gangsters, is important, while the wishes, wills and Delusion of the powerless to be of no importance.

But the pipeline that pumps this nasty heating and irritant gas into people's heads has a hole in it, the imagination that's used to forge curses and make movies.

Should power be more important than happiness?

“Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon” knows that the opposite is true.