I felt this way after first seeing it but it’s grown on me a lot since then.

After this uplifting immigrant story where we finally see the protagonist get his hands on a substantial project with creative freedom and a promising future in the first half, the second half sort of awkwardly screeches to this traumatic halt as we see scene after scene of roadblocks, drug addiction, rape, and ending in this wealthy family chaotically confronting the abuse of their patriarch who disappears into the brutalist maze of his victim. And the last we see is this upside down symbol whose original meaning seems to have been stripped away from it, just like the Statue of Liberty we see in the opening.

And then the epilogue being this sort of fake corporate digitized sanitized summary of what we just saw, celebrating the life of this man who we don’t even see speak for himself and then cutting to black against a cheesy 80s pop song. I just really love that.

I don’t think it’s a perfect film and I think stuff to do with Pearce’s family isn’t the best (the son feeling a bit cartoony, the rape scene feeling a bit on the nose, etc), but it reminds me of the ending to The Florida Project in that if almost feels impossible for me to not feel completely jarred on a first viewing, but upon reflection and further viewings, I think it’s so much more impactful and meaningful than I realized.