Braid exhibits both the greatest charms and worst faults of all directorial debuts: it’s tonally chaotic, unnecessarily showy, and overflowing with far too many ideas than what could comfortably fit in a single picture, yet those very qualities all amount to something that is undeniably fun & exciting. Hyperactive camera work tears through every color filter, image texture, and aspect ratio it can manage, as if this were a hand-held skateboarding compilation instead of a feature film. Concerns like logical consistency, tonal control, and purposeful pacing are all tossed out of the window in favor of gorgeous costumes & sets and over-the-top shocks in a twisty “plot” that’s too stoned & scatterbrained to possibly land anywhere solid. It’s the best kind of dirt-cheap indie production: the kind that just shoots a few fully-committed actors in an interesting locale and attempts to push those resources to their furthest possible limit in every single frame, logic be damned. It’s a total mess, but also a total blast.

Two amateur drug dealers escape police scrutiny by returning to the childhood home of a wealthy but mentally unwell friend who’s trapped in a never-ending game of violent make-believe. While in hiding (and searching the home for her cash-stuffed safe), they must play along with the friend’s house rules: Everyone must play; no outsiders allowed; nobody leaves. Their respective roles as Mommy, Doctor, and Daughter in this make-believe heist dynamic sledgehammers away at the border between fantasy & reality, and all three women rapidly backslide into the mania & trauma of young girls at play. As many horror premises as I’ve seen repeated over the years, “What if you had a friend who was still playing House and taking her role very seriously?” is a pretty unique story structure I can’t remember encountering onscreen before. The closest appropriate comparison might be to call the film a Heavenly Creatures for the Forever 21 era, with all the obsessive psychosexuality & fetish for brightly colored fashion that descriptor implies. Given the music video freak-outs, detours into torture porn, and disorienting repetition of the game’s core setup, however, no 1:1 comparison could ever fully cover what transpires here. There’s a lot going on, and it’s kind of all over the place – but it all feels delightfully, excitedly new.

Braid is going to be a huge turnoff for a lot of viewers. Not only is it a chaotic sugar rush that pulls the rug from under you so many times that there’s nowhere left to stand, but it’s also deliberately off-putting in its drama & politics. This is a film where one woman grows up to be a dominatrix because of her traumatic childhood, another spends the majority of her screentime dressed like a fetishized schoolgirl, and the third is supposedly driven mad by her own barren womb’s inability to carry child. I personally didn’t find myself getting too hung up on its more #problematic choices, though, mostly because I didn’t have the time. This is an 80 min whirlwind that spins you around until you’re vomitously dizzy and then chases you down the hallway with a knife. It’s an avalanche of pure candy (as long as you appreciate a certain sinister femme sensibility), and my head was swooning with too many pure-sugar pleasures to take notice of anything bitter: Madeleine Brewer in Grey Gardens drag, dollhouse miniatures with their own dollhouse miniatures nested inside, brightly colored silks & lace (sometimes splattered with gore, when necessary), etc. I don’t have much room left in my head for concerns with plot logic or politics when the other wares on display are this sumptuous, so I mostly just can’t wait to see whatever bonkers monstrosity new-comer Mitzi Peiron delivers next.

-Brandon Ledet