It is amazingly dark-humored. I love Aster's unhinged sense of humor.
Add a Review
-
Fernando-Rodrigues9 January 2021
-
Jeremy_Urquhart1 October 2023An absurdist comedy/parody of old detective stories, The Turtle's Head is stupid and immature, but kind of fun. I think it got the tone right throughout, and it might well offer some of the funniest moments from any Ari Aster film, short or feature-length.
I guess I'm surprised how so many of his short films are comedic, when his breakout films were the much more serious Hereditary and Midsommar. Even The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, which is his best-known short, doesn't have much by way of comedy. It means that his earlier short films tend to remind me most of Beau Is Afraid, which was also a horror movie but had plenty of absurd/dark comedy.
Like a good many short films, it ends on a bit of a flat note, but the ride there was still fun. Also, Richard Riehle's bizarrely committed performance made this considerably better than it otherwise would've been. -
Horst_In_Translation16 July 2019"The Turtle's Head" is an American 12-minute live action short film from 2014 in the English language, so this one has its 5th anniversary and the writer and director here was Ari Aster, who had his big breakthrough not too long ago with Toni Collette's Hereditary. Before that he was a pretty prolific short film director and here we have one of the works he came up with when he was not yet famous. I must say this is not the first of his short film works I watched and it is probably my least favorite so far. i really liked some of his other stuff, but this one here does nothing for me. It starts with a film noir setting basically and we have a detective who takes a mysterious order from an attractive woman, but things go quickly out of hand afterwards when he develops an enigmatic medical condition on his private parts. It does get graphic at times too let me warn you! So eventually, it is nothing really but a bit of awkward comedy and that is the only genre it falls into eventually. The crime component quickly disappears too. But I did not find it funny. The attention to detail and general approach to comedy could have been better, probably Aster was not yet where he is today in terms of writing. The only reason why I am not giving this an even lower rating (which would not have been undeserving) is basically because the lead actor does a pretty decent job with what he is given and keeps the film from being a big mess and falling apart anyway. Said lead actor by the way is Richard Riehle, who looks more like a tusk than a turtle honestly, and not the guy you see on the title's imdb picture. That would be Jim O'Heir playing a doctor here, but he also really has nothing to work with overall. Still he is certainly the most familiar face and people who have seen Parks&Rec, will immediately recognize him. I saw him in other short films too I think, he seems to be pretty prolific there, even if obviously he is nowhere near as big as the other Parks&Rec star who had his breakthrough on GotG and Jurassic Park. But I don#t like either particularly. Overall, this short film gets a thumbs-down from me and I don#t recommend checking it out. Glad it was this short.