Bottleneck (2014)
½ — Bottleneck (2014)
Right. I'm going to be honest with you. I sat through this so you don't have to, and I want those two minutes of my life back.
Two minutes. That's all Bottleneck runs. And yet somehow it still managed to outstay its welcome. As part of my A-Z World Movie Tour, Grenada brought me here, and I genuinely don't know what I did to deserve it. The film, if we're even going to call it that, is billed as a commentary on borders. Fine. Border commentary can be powerful stuff. It can make you think, make you uncomfortable, make you see the world a little differently. What it should not be is a slideshow of photographs tracking the growth of a jar of mung beans.
That is, I promise you, what this is. A jar of mung beans. Sprouting. Over some unspecified stretch of time. Photographed at intervals, strung together into a sequence, and presented to the world as a piece of border commentary. I've stared at it from every angle trying to find the metaphor, and look, maybe it's there. Maybe the beans represent the free movement of life across arbitrary human divisions. Maybe the jar is the state. Maybe I'm supposed to feel something about germination and restriction and growth. But if that's the argument, it isn't made. It's just... beans.
And then there's the soundtrack. Experimental is a generous word for it. Grating, uncomfortable, the kind of noise that makes you check whether something is broken on your end before you realise, no, this is intentional. Someone chose this. Someone sat down, cut this audio, and decided it was the right accompaniment to a time-lapse of sprouting legumes and called it done. I've heard challenging soundscapes used brilliantly in film before, where discomfort is the point and the sound design earns its place. This is not that. This is just unpleasant noise laid over unpleasant images in service of an idea that never actually shows up.
I do this World Movie Tour because I love the idea of cinema as a genuinely global thing, stories and perspectives from corners of the world that don't always get a platform. When it works, it's the whole reason I bother. Lost Boy in Juba (2017) is a good example of why I keep going, a film that actually used its subject and its setting to say something real. Bottleneck makes me wonder whether Grenada's entry into my tour was always going to be a write-off, and that feels unfair on Grenada, frankly.
The half star is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It's there because someone pointed a camera at something, assembled the images into a sequence, and uploaded it to a platform where it can be found and watched. That is technically the minimum viable definition of a film and so technically it gets the minimum viable rating. But I want to be clear: this is the closest I've come to a genuine zero in recent memory. It's a new contender for the worst thing I've encountered on this entire project, and I've watched some things.
If you're doing your own version of a world movie tour and you land on this for Grenada, I am sorry. Truly. Keep going. It gets better. It can only get better.
Half a star.
Rating: ½ | Year: 2014 | Watched: 2025-06-23
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