Parents' Guide to Doll House

The heart is in the right place throughout Doll House, but it is so poorly made that most of its legitimate emotionality takes a back seat to utter incompetence. There is now a large cohort of mediocre international movies out there, many funded by content-hungry Netflix. The generous funding occasionally results in great work by talented people, but it more often produces titles that exponentially increase the percentage of junk out there. Perhaps director Maria Ancheta will eventually learn the fundamentals of coherent filmmaking, but in this go-round, she begins with five or more flashbacks that whip past us in the first 10 minutes and leave us wondering where in time we are. Continuity is out the window. A random shot shows a clock tower reading 8:50. A second later a close-up of the same clock reads 1:00. A few minutes later, the same clock reads 9:15, and not long after that, we hear the clock chime five times, suggesting it's somehow 5:00. This movie is a good 30 minutes too long, so the clock footage is little more than confusing filler.

Worse yet, no one would mistake the characters here for real people. Who on earth would ever let a stranger off the street babysit for a kid? Once Rustin does babysit, you'd think he'd be extra careful to abide by the caretaker's rules. But against orders, he takes the girl somewhere and leaves her out of his sight: two big no-no's. After he's asked to stay away, he whisks her to a hotel and refuses to tell her adoptive mother where they are all night! Most parents would call the police, but not in this unrealistic universe. Clearly Rustin is in the grip of the disease of addiction, but he also has an ego that makes him hard to love. This is supposedly based on a true story, but that doesn't make it a good movie.