Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth is the kind of cinema that I instinctually respond to: brash, bold, unafraid of breaking traditions, and singularly idiosyncratic. In many ways a herald of the early 90s American indie explosion, the film is more concerned with style, character, and mood than the necessities of plot. And yet Hartley seems so interested in how his characters act—their eccentricities, their psychological hang-ups, their suburban ennui—that he forgets to actually develop them. The characters are almost robots, an apropos comparison considering how wooden some of the performances are. The film doesn’t just feel decentralized, it feels disassociated and depersonalized as it hobbles from one outrageously deadpan (or deadpan-ily outrageous?) conversation and confrontation to another. The most appealing thing about The Unbelievable Truth is its sheer audacity. But Hartley’s audacity is more admirable in theory than in praxis.
5/10
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