What I Think About Movies I've Seen

Eva is close to living the American dream. She's got a loving husband, a baby on the way, a house, and is soon to have a white picket fence. But Eva is an illegal alien from Mexico and did some things she's not proud of in order to get into the country. Her past comes back to haunt her when a man shows up demanding that she either honor the rest of their agreement (which she can't bring herself to do) or pay him a lot of money (which she doesn't have).

This is a gimmick movie, and in this case the gimmick is that all of the parts are played by mannequins. It's live-action, with unseen people manipulating them, and the result is a smoother and less distracting effect than many of the stop-motion attempts that I've seen. Even though it's obvious that they are mannequins throughout the entire movie, it's not as in-your-face as many other gimmick movies, and the story has more substance. It could have easily been made with real people rather than mannequins, and I think that the result probably would have been a little more compelling but much less likely to get anyone's attention.

This micro-budget movie was made here in Austin, and I attended a free screening provided by the filmmakers, although there wasn't enough time for Q&A afterward. I only have a couple of criticisms about the movie, around the lack of expression and pacing. Clearly, your options are limited when working with mannequins, but I think that they could have perhaps done more to try to convey emotion in the faces of the characters without too much cost (e.g., perhaps with camera, lighting, or makeup tricks) and without being too cheesy, and I think that had that been done then it could have been possible to get drawn into the story enough to forget you're not watching real people. In addition, I think that there might have been a little too much time spent on characters performing mundane tasks (e.g., folding laundry and washing dishes) that unnecessarily added to the length of the movie without providing any benefit, and the awkward nature in which they were conducted served as a further reminder that they were mannequins rather than real people.