The Childhood of a Leader (Brady Corbet, 2015)

Impudently out of its time in technique - Kubrick's Barry Lyndon or Bertolucci's The Conformist are some indicators - The Childhood of a Leader presents the idea of a brief period in the childhood of a young boy dislocated to a small village in France by his American diplomat father in the wake of WWI. He rebels against all and sundry in a calculated manner and the only things that drive us to see his smallest actions as the seeds of megalomania are the film's title and Scott Walker's overpowering, frenetic score, which turns even seemingly innocuous moments into a prelude into The Omen.
As cinema, it's a rare beast in this day and age, at times taking as long as Bela Tarr over a particular shot with the intention of letting some detail sink in. Hence, you have to applaud the sheer cojones, but overall it still doesn't really reward you for your patience: the character is generic, which is frankly an unnecessary cop-out, and more questions are left than answers.

6/10