Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Patience Watson One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

Benas Mcloughlin Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

vmmvieira I saw this movie in a festival 14 years ago. I was so disappointed and after all this time, I have not found a worst movie since... There are bad movies out there, that turn good again for their goofiness of silliness, but not this one. I love John Turturro, and he did not perform badly. He was simply mismanaged. The story is really poor, and the storytelling poorer. The suppose plot-twist we can see it coming after 30 minutes, and when it happens, it is the gunshot that wakes you up form the seat. Literally. The whole movie theater was sleeping, and that gunshot woke them up. The director had ideas and notions of grandeur that were lost in the most slow-paced movie I've seen, followed with uninteresting and disconnected cinematic tricks... Save yourself the from being woken up by an uncomfortable loud sound, and check something else.

Charles Jimenez I gained knowledge of Fear X from my interest in director Nicolas Winding Refn, after watching Drive, Only God Forgives, and The Neon Demon, I simply wanted to see more from Refn's filmography.Although Fear X is an interesting film, you wouldn't miss anything if you didn't watch this film.Some aspects are great, for instance the introduction intrigued you immediately from the great cinematography. However, the film falls flat on its creativity and where Fear X stands in the industry as well as Refn's filmography.In-comparison to Refn's other films, this is the simplest film I've seen from Refn, the film doesn't require an open-mind, just an interpret-able mind to fill in the blanks.I'd only recommend this film to fans of Refn as well as to people who feel as if they've seen everything.

baderfan Getting past the past bereavements has always been a tough task to do; in which for the most suffered or the ones who made the others suffer, would be the most difficult. Fear X deliberately manages to distinguish between the suffered and the latter,in one single character; In other words, exactly like the approach used in David Lynch's masterpiece "Lost Highway"!Built up slowly and reasonably to the point of inaccurately calculated and annoying ambiguity, its deliberately failure to offer a precise conclusion, fails to offer something different or newer than the above-mentioned feature film, likewise made the intentional obscurity,pointless and the movie in every word stutters before the Lost Highway's extremely exquisite words./ C+

NateWatchesCoolMovies Before Nicholas Winding Refn blew up into the big time with intense, stylish stuff like Bronson, Drive and Valhalla Rising, and after he made his bloody emergence into cinema with Pusher, he made another film that no one seems to remember or even even like all that much. It's easy to see why Fear X wasn't that well received or remembered: it's choppy and confusing, even by Refn's terms, and doesn't pull it's third act into a cohesive resolution, instead favoring a disconcertingly surreal descent into subconscious, abstract imagery, which we all know (the careers of Lynch and others are examples) is an aesthetic not always absorbed by the most open of minds when it comes to the masses. Now that we got that out of the way, here's my take. I adore the film. It's a skitchy Midwestern nightmare that starts of gently gnawing at the fringes of your perception with a sense of dread that's intangible in its possibility, an outcome as vast and unknowable as the desolate prairie setting that calls to mind the fear and degradation of Fargo without an ounce of its good humour, black or otherwise. John Turturro inhabits this setting with a twitchy, anxious aura, suggesting a haunted mindscape beneath those famous curls. And well he should be haunted, considering his wife recently disappeared without a trace. For him, not knowing what happened is worse than any kind of grisly answer, for its a sick hollowness that chokes out any room for him to grieve. He works by day as a mall security guard, busting shoplifters and scanning snowy surveillance screens to distract himself. Then, his co-worker (Stephen Eric Mcintyre) hands him a videotape that may contain answers and be the first breadcrumb in a trail leading to his wife's killer, and possibly his solace. In a lot of films and shows like these, the protagonist ventures to a small town with sordid secrets simmering just beneath the crust of the cheerful looking pie held by the pretty waitress at the local diner. Some artists find their own groove without riffing on other's work too much, and some fall flat-footed into derivative motions. Refn is bold yet subtle in his direction once Turturro arrives in the town, and casts a deceptively innocuous yet insidiously creepy spell over the proceedings. It's essentially where the film really exits utero and manifests, the danger before that was only glimpsed on the horizon now a very real possibility, like waking up from a bad dream into a worse reality. Turturro is met with cold stares and grim greetings, especially by a deputy who becomes predatory upon seeing part of the clues he has brought with him, vaguely tied to a local resident. From there he is led to a suspicious Sheriff (James Remar), and the sheriff's wife (Deborah Kara Unger). Remar may have been involved in his wife's death, and he plays with the curtain of his performance wonderfully, pulling it back ever so slightly in scenes with Unger (some of his best work) and stirring up confusion while menacing Turturro. It's an unheralded best from him and a rare occasion where he gets to be subtle and eerie, as opposed to his usual brash, cocky characters. Unger is similar to Remar in the sense that she has made a point over the course of her career in picking obscure, challenging and unique roles to play. In playing a couple here they feel kind of star-crossed just by the nature of their careers, fed by their smoldering chemistry. The film proceeds like any thriller would, with only intangible hints at the weirdness to come, until the last half of the third act, where it abandons logic completely and dives headlong into a dreamlike abyss of surreality, without a readily discernible warning or narrative signpost. Is Turturro unstable? Or is it Remar? Or are events just taking a turn fpr the supernatural as a result of the town messing with people's psyches, a la The Shining? We will never know, and honestly I doubt Refn did, or ever will either. It's him in the sandbox, free from logic or consequence, and hate it with all your might if you wish, but you can't deny it's a psychologically galvanizing experience that toys with your perception and spooks to the core. The film deals with themes of not knowing, and open ended tragedy masked by confusion and spiraling 'what ifs'. Perhaps Refn implemented all the metaphysical hoo-hah as an extreme metaphor for Turturro's consciousness, fractured and torn by the absence of resolution to the point of madness. Or maybe Refn just likes making weird stuff. That's the eternal debate with artists like him and Lynch: do they have some plan, a secret marauders map to the strangeness that they present to us on screen which only they are privy too, or are they simply making it up as they go along, hurling paint at the canvas until they are satisfied with the result, regardless of comprehending it? We'll never know, and that for me is the beauty of it. With Fear X Refn crafts a polarizing thriller that is the very proto - example of 'love it or hate it'. It's definitely not for everyone. But love it or hate it, there's no escaping it's power.