The Messmaker

lbenot

score 1/10

While the plot and storytelling probably flowed and entertained while reading the book, it doesn't while watching this movie.

It tried, but what you'll spend 2 hours watching is a strange, surrealistic, and downright goofy tale told in a very clunky, forced manner: A dressmaker, armed with her Singer sewing machine, returns to the town she's from in order to use her "dressmaking skills" (?) to get "revenge" (??) against everyone for having wrongly banished her from the town for a childhood crime she could not remember and did not commit. (???)

The central mother/daughter and protagonist/love-interest relationships are just as wooden, clunky, and forced.

You can see this movie straining to be stylistically quirky (was Winslet the right choice?) and darkly comedic (a diluted "Edward Scissorhands"), but in the end the screenplay, casting, editing, and directorial choices completely failed it.

lbenot 8 October 2016

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3558175/