If a gothic girl in her late teens / early twenties wanted to make a horror movie about how difficult it is to survive on her own because she doesn’t want to work and that she prefers to go to clubs every night and work on drawings and sleep all day and that her landlord is a bitch because she’s not getting the rent money owed her – “Nina” would be that movie.
Nina, who can barely be older than eighteen, lives in kind of an old, rundown (but chock full of gothic charm) apartment with an old hag of a landlord who gives Nina s**t at every chance she can get. She’s shown to be a horrible woman, someone you would cross the planet to avoid, but then you realize that all she really wants is the rent money that Nina owes her and that she wants to keep her food to herself, so she labels it all with her name. That sounds fair. I certainly don’t want anyone moochin’ off me, especially if they’re a lazy layabout who gets f****d up at clubs every night and refuses to hold a job. Yeah, Nina has some talent – she happens to be a very gifted illustrator, so it’s nice to see that she has something going for her, a little ambition, so you feel for her a bit. But then she winds up screwing a blind guy she meets on the street and then rips him off. Okay, so she’s a total bitch. And she really doesn’t even do anything with these drawings other than let them fuel her murderous hate towards her landlord.
All in all, the movie feels like a cry for help that life isn’t fair. To bring this point across, it has the look and feel of a dark and dreary horror movie, kinda like “The Ring.” You expect something unpleasant to pop out from around a corner at all times, but nothing happens. All unpleasantness is seated with Nina. She’s a total waste of space and it’s a shame that a movie has been based around a character so awful.
