Delayed Reaction: Euphoria

Premise: Two sisters go on a retreat that turns out to be an assisted suicide center for the sister who reveals that she's dying of cancer.

 

It's hard for me to take my mind out of the Oscar mindset sometimes. I start seeing every movie in terms of Oscar hopes. For any movie with a serious subject matter, I imagine the agent coming to an actress screaming "I found your next Oscar" or I envision directors dreaming of being the talk of the Venice or Toronto Film Festivals. In truth, it's probably much more favor, collaborator, and experiment-based than I give it credit for.

 

Take Euphoria for example. This is a movie about Eva Green as a woman dying of cancer and designing her last few days. Alicia Vikander is the sister blindsided by both the cancer diagnosis and the purpose of this trip. This screams "Oscar bait" to me. Vikander had just won for The Danish Girl and was looking to level up. Eva Green is a highly respected actress who's never found that Oscar nomination and was picking a role that was sure to get that kind of attention. And maybe that was the intent of the movie. Look at it a little closer and I see a different story though. Vikander's newly created production company made Euphoria movie. The director is Lisa Langesth, who is a fellow Swede Vikander had worked with on two previous movies. Perhaps they're just friends who were more focused on working together than attention that would come later. As much as I love Eva Green, she's mostly known for playing Tim Burton-y character roles. Maybe she just wanted to play a different kind of character than she normally gets to. Maybe Charles Dance had an opening in his schedule and was bored. Maybe Charlotte Rampling simply wanted a chance to work with "that lovely Vikander girl who Michael [Fassbender] spoke so highly of on the set of Assassin’s Creed".

 

So, before I call this failed Oscar bait, I need to remember that it was probably not even made with that intention. OK, I got that out of the way... Euphoria was too overwrought for my taste. It uses this controlled environment to focus even more on the emotions the characters are processing. It has the unintended effect of making them too isolated though. There's nothing else going on other than them facing Green's death. No real world concerns. No lingering questions about how much time she has left. It all feels abstract at this suicide center. The movie is meant to be about two sisters who barely ever see each other and are reconnecting in their final days together. By taking them out of the world though, there's no sense of their lives being apart. It felt like an acting camp where each day they were focusing on a different emotion: anger, regret, harmony, peace, etc.

 

It's far from my favorite role for either of the main actresses. It's a lot of Alicia Vikander scowling and Eva Green acting like she's two hours into an argument that Vikander didn't know she was in. I wish the movie had more to say that I haven't heard before. It lands on the same stuff about coming to terms with your own and others' mortality.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend