Metacritic reviews

Funny Face is a rare gem of a film that will keep you guessing from beginning to end, and you’ll be lucky if you get to see it.

A hypotensive urban fairy tale with not quite enough “tale” to justify the tag, it’s a collection of impressions, in often striking imagery, of a New York borough imagined as a faraway land of rooftops and distant lights and corner bodegas where every day—every moment even—seems to start with “once upon a time.”

Tim Sutton is a deft cartographer of how environments can shape its inhabitants.

The characterizations are threadbare and simple: Saul and Zama are the downbeat 99% (his creepy mask recalls both Joker and Anonymous); Miller’s character represents soulless commerce. What Funny Face lacks in social commentary, however, it makes up for in mood.

As with all of the director’s previous work, Funny Face is electric and moribund in equal measure, the simplicity of its story obscured by the opacity of its telling. The film is so unformed that it feels like its shots might disassociate from each other at any moment, but also so unsubtle that its script could’ve been sky-written over Brooklyn.

Tim Sutton’s idiosyncratic outsider romance contains moments of haunting oddness, but has a tendency to stab home its points and issues rather emphatically.

Donnybrook aside, Sutton has largely devoted his career to mood pieces like Dark Night and Memphis where concept is key. In Funny Face, he puts everything in movie-movie-ish scare quotes—a self-defeating approach for a paean to urban authenticity.

Oddly, Funny Face feels more like a promising but overreaching debut than any of his earlier films, particularly at the level of its slender script, heavy as it is on banal, minimalist dialogue that doesn’t fuel the flickering chemistry between leads Cosmo Jarvis (“Lady Macbeth”) and appealing newcomer Dela Meskienyar as best it could.

The director's gifted collaborators sometimes perk up this listless parable, but never enough to sell its second-hand fatalism.