Featuring music instead of any dialogue and set in a near Kafkaesque
Director: Peter Sellars
Writers: the director & 4 stars listed here.
Stars: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Joan Cusack, Peter Gallagher, Ron Vawter.
Watched online; very blurry. The print was in 5 pieces: 17, 19, 19, 19, 20, totalling only 94 min, nowhere near the 111 IMDb has for the runtime.
This might be a 5, but it was so blurry I didn't recognize MB until well into his screen time, and the few words onscreen were too blurry to read until the last card, and that was very generic. So this is a silent film with no intertitles, and difficult to follow. But I suspect that's intentional.
I have not seen Dr. Caligari ('20), but I suspect the synopsis writer was summarizing that film, not this one. I have no idea, for instance, who is the bureaucrat referenced: Cusack? Gallagher? "Next" implies prior, so who was the prior victim: the murdered coworker? The woman strangled in her home? Who was the hideous sidekick: MB? I didn't connect those 2 homeless men at all. And this didn't seem like the future or the near future; it seemed like the 80s, especially given director PS's introductory remarks.
We don't discover which character is the Doctor until very near the end, when all the characters come together in what appears to be a mental institution.
IMDb rating 5.1 with 125 votes. I could not find any copy for purchase.
distr. PBS (US, '93), dir. Sellars; 6-
