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4.0 out of 5 starsand then offers some pretty jumpy time travel to go back and fill in ...
Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2016
You have to have a high tolerance for ellipses to get much out of this film. The director has made the decision to hold the audience at quite a distance, which may account for many of the negative responses on this site. If you're looking for a conventionally accessible narrative, don't look here. Complete Unknown starts by telling you almost nothing about the main characters (Weisz's and Shannon's), and then offers some pretty jumpy time travel to go back and fill in the blanks. Only it doesn't. Fill in the blanks, I mean. Well, some of them, to be sure. Otherwise, you're pretty much left to supply the missing puzzle pieces. Suggesting - to me, at least - it's partly a test to see if the viewer is paying really close attention - I'm probably going to watch it again - and also to say whatever backstory you, the viewer, comes up with is OK. For viewers who like their mysteries tied up in neat packages are (a) not going to be happy here and (b) shouldn't try to understand any of the BBC "Vera" episodes in a single viewing.
OK, what is the nature of Tom's and Jenny's relationship? Well, that's the main question, isn't it? The dialogue hints, but there are only a few pieces given us, like Tom has some affection for Jenny's father, and that Jenny pulled up stakes abruptly - I guess we're to infer in the midst of some kind of invovlement between them - and without looking back. That's really the theme here, right? Or one possible theme: don't look back. We viewers can't, of course. So we listen to them speak to each as if they were spies who worked together and then were separated and kept from resolving whatever might have been unresolved the last time they spied together.
She has some feeling. When she said, "Will you come with me?" in their final scene, she teared up when he rejected her offer in favor of holding on to his current life (troubled marriage - whose isn't? - job whose completion is a sensitive matter to Tom). His affect throughout was a mix of astonishment laced with no small amount of anger, and his sustained distance from her in that final scene was a nice bit of directing and acting on Mr. Shannon's part and added another possible plot thrust which was that Jenny, herself the perpetrator of the 15-year sudden break, was more involved than Tom and the more suffering of the two, even though she is supposed to be the "Complete Unknown" in the piece. Or is she really? She likes to don new personas and insert herself in new societies and jobs as a way of living life as a kind of picaresque where work, friends, lovers, are decidedly impermanent and quite soluble. The fact Jenny comes back to find Tom and reconnect with him as a link to a past which, while suggestively volatile, may be haunting her in a way she wasn't prepared for. We don't know. She doesn't say.
There are some appealing and surprisingly accessible figures in the story: Tom's brother for one and Tom's wife for 2 and even the small role for wife's brother is really effectively played and quite believable. Yes, things go by quickly, even though the pace is sometimes plodding - a strange contradiction - but I ended up caring for more of the characters then the Amazon reviews I read before watching the film led me to expect. Most other viewers were not convinced, seemed to be bored by Jenny and worse seemed to caught up in judging her negatively leading them to a poor response to the film. Totally understandable. Maybe it was just my mood, but I felt a lot of sadness for the Jenny character, but was relieved at the end that Tom spurned her invitation to flee.
You need patience and openness to watch this film, and that still might not do it. The frog imagery escaped me. I probably need to read more reviews because someone might have something there to help me in understanding it. I came away feeling the filmmaker has a very personal story to tell, not necessarily autobiographical, but coming somewhere out of a deep psychic place. Some feel, as I read the reviews, that the viewer is a figure trying to penetrate into that narrative space where the mysteries of the film live, but has been denied the secret handshake that would gain him/her entrance.