In essentially offering up The Twelfth Night as a hazy Shakespearean mash-up, Viola isn't so much deeply disrespecting notions of ownership, authorship, etc., as charitably redefining them.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
The mischievous paradox of Matías Piñeiro’s Viola is that it is at once devilishly complicated and perfectly simple.
The world the film describes is so vividly realized that it seems to spill over the edges of the frame, as if the lives of its characters will continue after the credits roll.
The Hollywood Reporter by Frank Scheck
While the pleasures of the brief (65 minutes) Viola are modest, it displays an imagination and stylishness that marks the young filmmaker as someone to watch.
Moreover, the story doesn’t climax in all’s-well-that-ends-well matrimony, instead building to a beautifully bittersweet moment of self-realization, one with a light-touch profundity that would make the Bard proud.
Viola owes much of the pleasure it offers to the sorts of things one looks for in any good movie: an attractive cast, attractively photographed in an attractive location, and plotting that manages to feel relaxed without being lazy.
The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo
It’s a pleasant, negligible wisp of a movie, notable mostly for what it suggests of its director’s potential.