‘Everything Will Be OK’ Review: Rithy Panh’s Exhaustingly Overloaded Dystopian Dream Journal is More Psyop Than Movie
variety.comJessica Kiang The title, you might not be surprised to hear, is ironic: In Rithy Panh’s frenetic, splenetic new hybrid essay film, everything will most assuredly not be OK.
Humans, with our immense capacity for microscopic and macroscopic cruelty, will not be OK. Animals, even if they manage to turn the tables on us, will also not be OK.
The planet, in a near-future shaped exclusively by the evils of the near-past, will be the very definition of not-OK. And perhaps the battered viewer — assailed by an interminable 98 minutes of untethered, oneiric narration over split-screen footage of genocide and industrial livestock slaughter, while an “Animal Farm”-inspired sci-fi drama plays out in handmade, clay-modeled diorama — will be the least OK of all.
The little clay critters are cute, though. In one regard, “Everything Will Be OK” is as good as its word. Panh crams so much into his film that it feels like he really is doing his damnedest to include everything: pulped-down battery chicks, George Méliès, solemn old photographs placed symbolically in a sparkling stream, technoparanoia, Hitler, Super-8 home movies, pandemic commentary, “Planet of the Apes.” The resulting cacophony feels less like argument than assault, or perhaps the kind of aversion therapy Alex from “A Clockwork Orange” might have been subjected to.
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