The Worst Movie of 2023 (and Darth Vader)

We're really bad at real redemption.

If you know me, you know I’ve got quite a few opinions and they’re all strong. That said, I’ve been trying to shift my language when it comes to art. Someone pointed out (I don’t remember who, I am sorry!!!) that nobody sets out to make a bad movie. The same is true of books, music… you get the idea. So largely, I’ve been trying to express myself in terms of whether something “worked” for me or not.

That said, sometimes, it’s not just that a piece of art doesn’t work. Sometimes, it’s working just fine, and I find the end product distasteful. “I get it,” I want to say. “I just don’t like it.”

So in that spirit, I want to tell you about the movie of 2023 that I truly, genuinely despised.

It’s not Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool, though that was definitely one I got but didn’t think had anything particularly interesting to say (plenty of critics disagreed with me!). It wasn’t The Boogeyman, the aggressively forgettable adaptation of a Stephen King short story that relegated the terrific short to a five-minute scene near the front of the film and then designed the monster by Mad Lib, I think. It wasn’t even the much-and-fairly-maligned Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, the slasher made once everyone’s favorite honey-obsessed bear entered the public domain.

No, let’s talk about a very strange film that’s also so confused about the message it wants to send it ends up exonerating genocide.