Review of Mammoth (2009)
It would have been better if Salvador were merely robbed. As in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), the improbable severity of the climax breaks the enjoyably naturalist frame in an effort to achieve a heightened symbolic value, set apart from the realism that is the film’s only real strength. This may be what invited the accusations of misogyny; people expected the whole thing to be primarily symbolic because the disaster is.