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EO Movie Review

EO is a 2022 Polish road movie directed by Jerzy Skolimowski and starring Sandra Drzymalska. It is a slow and meandering, but moving and very well made flick.

A donkey wanders around Europe, meeting people and experiencing turns of fortune. This movie was obviously inspired by Robert Bresson’s famous film ‘Au Hasard Balthazar’. It just might be thought of as a remake of that seminal work. My main issue is that I’ve never particularly cared for that movie and I do not find it necessary to adapt this story once again, and certainly in the finished product you can sense that lack of necessity throughout.

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EO is superbly crafted across the board. The performances are strong, both from the humans and from the donkeys. Sandra Drzymalska delivers the best performance as the only remotely well developed character who gets more to do than everybody else. The directing from Skolimowski is also stylish and strong.

The highlight is the cinematography that would signal something made from a promising young talent. The fact that an older director made such a kinetic movie is admirable and he should be given praise for it. The use of the color red in certain scenes to heighten emotions was wonderful and those moments were both artistic and very memorable.

But the problem with EO is that it just goes through the motions. The story is very slim and the film is concerned more with being an artsy road film than with having a more meaningful storyline. The pacing is ridiculously slow and the movie is too boring even for its short runtime. It needed better characterization and script for sure, though the emphasis on the donkey himself was wonderful while the choice to divert from an overly emotional tone was also refreshing in this instance.

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