Eureka Movie Review: Even Viggo Mortensen Can’t Save It

Eureka falls flat on many levels, including story and cinematography. An incredible performance by Viggo Mortensen cannot even save it.

Eureka is a drama/thriller that premiered at Cannes Film Festival – making its way around the festivals, we got to check it out at New York Film Festival and the film left us speechless, in a bad way.

Eureka follows Viggo Mortensen’s Murphy as he searches for his daughter after she was kidnapped. Though this is a ‘plot synopsis’ of the film, it is only five percent of the movie – but also, unfortunately, the only decent part of the film. To no one’s surprise Viggo Mortensen gives an amazing performance but that is about the furthest any positives about the film go.

Poorly Constructed Plot (There Isn’t One!)

As mentioned previously five percent of the film includes Viggo Mortensen and without giving any spoilers away, he technically isn’t even a real character. The film starts as a western, over-acted, but in a comedic way, it slightly works. Once a little revelation is made we get into this police thriller element. We are then introduced to two more main characters, and the acting from these two new actresses is horrible.

We will get back to that later because not only is there a police thriller but it later turns into a runaway, immigrant worker, something story? There is quite literally no structure and connection between the plots and even though it still wouldn’t make sense, at least splitting the film up into chapters would allow for some level of construction between the random stories.

Childish Writing

Now to give some credit the baseline material that the film is writing about is interesting, the thought process of law enforcement, a western kidnapping?? Nevertheless, there is something interesting at the core, but all of the dialogue in this film sucks. Profanity is overused to the extent that you would think a middle-schooler who just learned how to curse was writing the film. Not a single character has a motivation, no arcs, literally nothing of substance happens in this film and that includes the level of writing.

Obnoxious Filmmaking

Of course filmmaking has a lot of layers but wow does the film just keep falling flat. The best comparison to make is a really pretentious student film. Every shot is elongated and almost always unnecessary. There are multiple times where the camera is still and pans across the room for over three minutes at a time. This “creative choice” is probably one of the most unbearable things I’ve sat through in recent history.

I’d like to also group in the cinematography with the filmmaking because even if a movie is boring it can look good. This is not that movie. The entire film looks like there was no one in charge of the cinematography. Improv shot selection, I’d be surprised if there was even a shot list while they were filming the movie.

Extended Runtime

To put it bluntly this film feels double, maybe triple its runtime. It is already a chunky two hours and twenty-six minutes but wow does it feel like I wasted my entire day watching this film. If a film is ever touching over one-hundred-fifty minutes it needs to tell an epic story that truly immerses me into the world. Eureka doesn’t even have a story.

Situational Storytelling

Speaking of the runtime, the main reason why the almost 150 minute runtime doesn’t work is because the film is so situational in its story choices. We as the audience are observing more than experiencing, but was there a reason to observe what this movie had to give… no.

With everything I said aside, the director does have a track record of making films in the same general vain as Eureka so if this is your thing then more power to you. As someone who has never been a fan of situational storytelling much less situational storytelling with no story, this film was never going to work for me.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day someone might find value in this mess of a movie I’ve called incoherent and unnecessary so of course watch it for yourself, but this one was not for me.

Rating: 1 out of 5

NEXT: Priscilla Review: An Uncomfortable But Important Story

About Eureka

The protean Argentinean director Lisandro Alonso (La Libertad, NYFF39; Jauja, NYFF52) continues to shapeshift, delight, and challenge with his marvelous and immersive new film, which takes the viewer on an unexpected journey through three stories set in wildly different terrain, each of them reflecting lives haunted by the specter of colonialist violence.

In the first, Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni guest-star in a black-and-white neo-Western pastiche following a taciturn gunslinger seeking revenge in a lawless frontier town. In the second section, in a different kind of law-and-order narrative, set during the present day in the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, we accompany a Native American cop (Alaina Clifford) on her nighttime patrols, revealing a community troubled by addiction and poverty, but also, because of the cop’s good-hearted basketball coach niece (Sadie Lapointe), touched by transcendence.

Finally, the film travels to the magnificent Brazilian rainforest of the 1970s, where Indigenous workers pan for gold while articulating their dream lives. Cleverly transitioning between segments without hand-holding the viewer, Alonso has created an improbably unified aesthetic experience that leaves it up to us to make the connections among its transient worlds.

Eureka played at the 2023 NYFF.