Why Slice of Life Movies Only Appeal to a Slice of the Audience

A deep dive into what makes slice of life filmmaking special

I just finished watching Alfonso Cauron’s Roma (2018). While there were things I liked about it, it didn’t resonate with me and I thought it was slow and boring.

Furthermore, I thought there were some missed opportunities in the film’s presentation. Read more about this in my review of the film here.

After my first viewing of Roma I decided to get on the internet and see what everyone else was saying about the film. What I found was that half of the reactions to the film were overwhelmingly positive and the other half were people that felt like it was a waste of time.

I realized that this is often the case with films in the slice of life genre, and decided to investigate why.

Why is there always this even split reaction to slice of life films?

Sometimes after watching a slice of life film we coincidentally have that initial onset of disillusionment after experiencing them- that feeling of “what actually was accomplished?”.

And like any slice of life we look back on it and search for the poignant moments, often discovering their significance within a larger narrative.

Slice of life movies are deliberately exempt of all of the techniques and motifs implemented in film to make them exciting and engaging. They leave out all of the tensions, the setups, the twists, the reveals, the big pay offs, etc. It’s almost an anti-film. What’s left is an experience that feels, well, ordinary.

What Slice of Life cinema does well, that perhaps no other style of filmmaking other than the Documentary can achieve, is that it gives us the opportunity to find the beauty in the mundane, the universal in the subjective. It gives us an opportunity to find significance in the ordinary events of everyday life.

Because Slice of life films don’t have the conscious deliberation found in traditional feature films they don’t feel as contrived.

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