drama

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

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The #1 rule when attending someone else’s wedding is that you are not, under any circumstances, to make the day about yourself. It’s okay to be a little overly playful, helpful, sentimental, or even chaotic, as long as you avoid becoming the main character on someone else’s Big Special Day. I say that to explain why Jonathan Demme’s 2008 family drama Rachel Getting Married is excruciatingly stressful from start to end despite its setting at what appears to be an overall successfully fun, pleasant party. Anne Hathaway’s recovering-addict antiheroine breaks the #1 wedding rule even more frequently & thoroughly than Julia Roberts’s psychopathic pond-scum romcom lead in My Best Friend’s Wedding. The titular Rachel (Rosemary DeWitt) may be getting married, but her prodigal sister Kym (Hathaway) is pathologically incapable of ceding the spotlight to her for the occasion, since every day of their lives since Kym’s years as a teenage pillhead have been about Kym’s catastrophic, life-ruining fuckups, one after another. The trick of the movie, then, is in Demme’s humanist approach to characterization, leaving you with an equally loving feeling for both sisters, despite one of them obviously being in the deep end of the moral wrong. Every minute of the movie is hell, and yet you walk away feeling like you just met dozens of new friends at a fabulous party, wishing them all the best.

We meet Kym as she’s chainsmoking outside of rehab, hiding behind inch-thick mascara, shaking off the sugary aftertaste of earlier Hathaway breakouts like The Princess Diaries & The Devil Wears Prada. She returns to her family home under intense scrutiny, raising the hairs on every neck in every room she walks into. It isn’t until a periodic NA meeting halfway into the film that it’s fully explained why her presence has that chilling effect. It’s because when she was a pilled-out teenager, she crashed the family car with her younger brother inside, killing him by accident. Her sister (DeWitt) & father (Bill Irwin) still love her, of course, but every day of their lives since that accident has been a reaction to and recovery from the biggest mistake she ever made — the reckless killing of the family’s most vulnerable member. So, when Rachel begs for her wedding to finally be one day that’s about her and not her sister, it’s not the megalomaniacal ramblings of a Bridezilla gone mad; it’s a desperate plea from a caring family member who just needs a break. Kym can’t give her that one day, though, because she hasn’t fully healed yet, and so Rachel getting married has no effect on yet another family gathering becoming another 24/7 marathon episode of The Kym Show, all Kym all the time. Even the sisters’ long-suffering father can’t help but direct his attention to that wayward lamb, even though her mere presence breaks his heart by reminding him of what he’s already lost.

Jonathan Demme manages to stage all of that small, intimate familial melodrama within a large, sprawling party that spreads out for days across rehearsals, nuptials, and goodbyes. As many Hollywood Studio auteurs found themselves doing in the aughts, Demme challenged himself by stripping back the grand-scale production of his more typical work to instead rely on direct, handheld digi cinematography. Under a self-imposed adherence to the rules & principles of Dogme 95, he shot Rachel Getting Married more like a wedding video than a proper feature film. An insanely stacked cast of party guests like rapper Fab Five Freddy, Soft Boys singer Robyn Hitchcock, Dan Deacon collaborator Jimmy Joe Roche, and TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe (as the mostly silent groom) fill the event space, often sharing their various musical talents to entertain each other as the main cast works out their familial issues in the foreground. It’s such a crowded cast of talented people that Demme’s early mentor Roger Corman is listed in the opening credits, but you only catch a single glimpse of him working a digicam during the ceremonial vows. It’s as if Jonathan Demme took the Gene Siskel Test of “Is this movie more interesting than a documentary about the same actors having lunch?” as a kind of challenge by instead asking “Why can’t it be both?” There’s a very real, infectiously fun party going on during Rachel’s wedding that makes the manufactured melodrama that threatens to unravel it all the more stressful.

It’s no small miracle that amongst all that chaotic, freeform partying—effectively shot in real time—Demme still managed to leave space for moments of quiet intimacy. There are countless personalities bouncing around this family home threatening to distract from Kym’s many, many ongoing crises, and Demme carefully takes the time to listen to them with great interest — whether they’re sharing hardships during NA meetings, embarrassing themselves during rehearsal dinner toasts, or jamming out with the wedding band. The single most miraculous scene involves a competitive loading & unloading of the house’s dishwasher: a moment that starts as a small jest between Bill Irwin & Tunde Adebimpe as newly united family members, then escalates into a party-wide bloodsport, and inevitably crashes down into heartbreak once Kym inserts herself into the fray once again. It’s a scene so perfectly conceived that it acts as its own proof-of-concept short film that encapsulates everything about the family & party dynamics that an outsider would need to know, and it’s just as instantly iconic as anything Demme achieved in bigger-scale projects like Philadelphia, The Manchurian Candidate, or Silence of the Lambs. It also speaks well to him that he didn’t allow Kym to become just as much of an iconic villain as his version of Hannibal Lecter was, working with Hathaway to make sure that she’s another beloved member of that party even though she’s the sole source of all its teeth-grinding tension.

-Brandon Ledet

Eve’s Bayou (1997)

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“All I know is, there must be a divine point to it all, and it’s just over my head. That when we die, it will all come clear. And then we’ll say, ‘So that was the damn point.’ And sometimes, I think there’s no point at all, and maybe that’s the point. All I know is most people’s lives are a great disappointment to them and no one leaves this earth without feeling terrible pain. And if there is no divine explanation at the end of it all, well … that’s sad.”

Debbi Morgan performs that speech in Eve’s Bayou while staring blank-eyed into the Louisiana nightscape. She then catches herself, realizing that she’s been talking to a small child instead of just pontificating into the night air. That intergenerational relationship is the core of this 1997 supernatural melodrama, in which a 10-year-old mystic-in-training (Full House‘s Jurnee Smollett) learns how to make sense of her psychic visions and magic intuitions under the guidance of her Aunt Mozelle (Morgan). Its plot synopsis sounds like it could belong to a Teen Witch-style coming-of-age comedy for kids, but Eve’s Bayou instead frames a decidedly adult world through a child’s eyes. Its witchcraft isn’t used to present playful wish fulfillment for youngsters, but to dredge up heaps of generational pain from the murky bottom of Louisiana swamps so it can finally rot in the sun. The film opens with an adult Eve Batiste recounting her small, Black community’s history as a slave plantation, then announcing that she’s going to tell the story about the summer she killed her father, in 1962. Naturally, most of the story that follows involves a young Eve observing & reacting to her father’s adult (and adulterous) behavior as the audience anticipates that foretold act of violence, but the heart of the story is more about her characterization as the next-generation mystic learning the ways of the world from her Aunt Mozelle.

Writer-director Kasi Lemmons describes her debut feature as autofictional, characterizing the young Eve as “a little bit me, a little bit Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird.” Although raised in St. Louis, Lemmons has vivid memories of visiting relatives in the Deep South (Alabama, not Louisiana) that she felt compelled to illustrate onscreen here, mixed with fictional stories of a philandering town doctor she created for a proof-of-concept short film titled “Dr. Hugo”. Lemmons’s biggest champion, Samuel L. Jackson, stars as that town doctor and town bicycle: little Eve’s doomed-to-die father. Lynn Whitfield plays the matriarch, frequently and credibly described as “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World,” suffering silently as her husband makes his professional & romantic rounds around town while she raises his three kids at home. Eve’s teenage sister Cicely (Meagan Good) takes after their mother’s practiced poise, but the younger Eve is much more resistant to being tamed and instead learns how to interact with the world from her Hoodoo-practicing aunt. The world is split in two between the sibling sets of both generations: a world of magic vs. a world of rational thought. It doesn’t matter which of those worldviews eventually wins out, though, since the end result is a foregone conclusion by the opening narration. Her father will die, and the painful familial secrets hidden by social niceties will eventually come to light.

The mysticism of Eve’s Bayou is more about subjective perception than about supernatural action. Eve and her aunt cannot change the world through supernatural means, but they can see parts of it that others are blind to. Their psychic visions are illustrated in surrealist black-and-white montage, with standalone images of spiders, clocks, and dirty needles superimposed onto the swamps just outside their homes. Lemmons positions the act of conjuring this imagery through cinema as a form of witchcraft, explaining in dialogue that memory is itself “a selection of images” and that the modern world is “haunted by the past.” In the Southern ghost story tradition of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, she invites the ghosts of the past to enter the story through the technological conduits of cameras, mirrors, and word processors. Every individual character’s memory, no matter how rationally minded, is positioned as a kind of supernatural realm in that context, and she does her best not to exclude any one version of the truth in her ambiguous telling of the circumstances behind the doctor’s death. The only character who doesn’t get their say is a disabled uncle who cannot speak due to his cerebral palsy symptoms, so his own memories and accounts of the truth are confined to his own mind. Like the audience, he can only observe, but he’s got a much more direct vantage point in seeing What Really Happened in the lead-up to the tragedy.

Speaking of memory, you might not remember that Eve had a disabled family member in her home, since a producer asked to have him removed from the original 1990s theatrical release, thinking that he would jeopardize the film’s commercial appeal by making audiences “uncomfortable.” The uncle’s place in the story was then later restored in a “Director’s Cut” released in the 2010s, also restoring the film’s core theme of the magical subjectivity of perception & memory. The initial choice to remove him is indicative of the many ways in which the film’s commercial appeal was misunderstood in its initial 90s release. Besides Samuel L. Jackson backing the film as a producer & star, critic Roger Ebert was likely its most vocal champion in the industry, concluding his 1997 review with the declaration that, “If it is not nominated for Academy Awards, then the academy is not paying attention. For the viewer, it is a reminder that sometimes films can venture into the realms of poetry and dreams.” Eve’s Bayou was not nominated for any Academy Awards. It made enough money to register as an indie-level hit, but it still didn’t lead to much of a professional windfall for Lemmons, who spent the most of her remaining career as a director-for-hire in the impersonal world of studio biopics. It’s easy to guess why this movie didn’t attract major studio backing, why Lemmons didn’t become a blank-check auteur, why Lynn “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” Whitfield didn’t become a Hollywood superstar, and why Ebert’s Oscars predictions went nowhere: in a word, racism. Still, it continues to shine as a reminder that sometimes films can venture into the realms of poetry and dreams without straying from mainstream filmmaking sensibilities, even when working outside mainstream filmmaking funding.

-Brandon Ledet

Holes (2003)

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There’s a sequence in Megadoc that features Shia LaBeouf talking about the great respect that he has for Jon Voight as an actor, despite their extreme disconnect on politics. I didn’t realize it at that time just how far back their connection went, as I had not yet seen the 2003 film adaptation of Louis Sachar’s novel Holes, which featured a then-teenaged LaBeouf in the title role of Stanley Yelnats IV, a wrongfully imprisoned child laborer whose adult enemies include overseer Mr. Sir, played by Voight. My blind spot on this topic came up in conversation at a recent post-New Year’s hangout, and I had to admit that although I had grown up reading Sachar’s work (my Scholastic book fair copy of Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger was so well loved it eventually fell apart), I had never read or seen Holes. Not only did I not realize that the film was chock full of movie stars, but that the text itself was notably complex, textually intertwined, and much more thoughtful than most fare made for children. 

Generations ago in the old country, Stanley Yelnats IV’s great, great-grandfather Elya brought down a curse on his bloodline by failing to deliver on his promised payment to Madame Zeroni (Eartha Kitt) that he carry her up a hill to drink from a spring. At the end of the nineteenth century in fertile Green Lake, Texas, the son of the town’s wealthiest man, Trout Walker, is spurned by kind-hearted schoolteacher Katherine Barlow (Patricia Arquette). When he later discovers that she is in love with Black onion farmer Sam (Dulé Hill), he leads a mob that burns down the school and results in Sam’s death while he is rowing across the lake from his onion farm. Sam’s death seems to curse the town, as it never rains again and the lake dries up. Heartbroken, the former schoolmarm rechristens herself “Kissin’ Kate Barlow” and avenges Sam’s death by becoming an outlaw, eventually robbing a stagecoach occupied by Elya’s son, the first Stanley Yelnats. Stanley survives, but his stories of “taking refuge on God’s thumb” make little sense to his descendants. Kissin’ Kate buries all of her loot somewhere in the salt flats that were once Green Lake and allows herself to die from the bite of a yellow spotted lizard rather than allow Trout Walker to try and torture the location out of her. 

A century later, Stanley Yelnats III (Henry Winkler) is trying to create a perfect recipe for foot odor, and his son is overjoyed when a pair of cleats belonging to a major baseball star seem to fall from the sky, but he’s caught with them and the shoes turn out to have been stolen from a charity auction, with young Stanley taking the offer from the judge to go to Camp Green Lake instead of juvenile detention. Once there, he meets his bunk’s “counselor,” “Doctor” Pendanski (Tim Blake Nelson) as well as the aforementioned Mr. Sir, whose role at the “camp” is unclear other than to be a brute and a bully. He’s also introduced to his fellow inmates and their typical kiddie novel prison nicknames: “Armpit,” “Zig-Zag,” “X-Ray” (Brenden Jefferson), “Magnet,” “Squid,” and most importantly, “Zero” (Khleo Thomas). Each day, the boys are driven a distance from the “camp” to dig a hole, five feet in diameter and just as deep, to “build character,” with the tantalizing promise that if they find anything interesting, they might get the rest of the day off. Despite being the smallest of the inmates by quite a bit, Zero is the fastest digger, and he offers to help Stanley with his hole every day in exchange for teaching Zero to read. When Stanley finds a small metal tube engraved with the initials “K.B.,” he’s bullied into letting X-Ray take the credit, which finally gets Camp Green Lake’s heretofore unseen warden (Sigourney Weaver) out of her house to lead a thorough excavation of everywhere around X-Ray’s hole, indicating that they’re not just digging holes for carceral punishment, but because she’s looking for something out there.

The construction of this little narrative is surprisingly elegant for something made by Disney in the twenty-first century. Most of that intricacy comes as a result of having the novel’s author write the screenplay, which ensured that all of the rich subtext that characterized the Newbery Medal-winning book made it to the screen. All of that plot synopsis above is doled out in beautifully concise increments, with all of the planting of future payoffs feeling completely organic and real. The story of Elya Yelnats is related as if it were no more than a typical family story that playfully scapegoats an ancestor for the clan’s current financial predicaments, and the reveal that Zero’s real name is Hector Zeroni, sharing the last name of the woman whom Elya failed to close the loop with before heading to America, comes late enough in the film that the primarily young audience has probably completely forgotten about her by then. Although the film doesn’t show Trout Walker calling Sam any racist epithets, it doesn’t shy away from demonstrating the dangers to a star-crossed mixed race couple in the 1880s, or the fatal outcome of racist mobbery; the only concession it makes (other than sanitizing its language) is filming Sam’s death at a distance, as Kate stands on the shores of the lake trying to warn him before the peal of a gunshot and Sam’s distant figure collapsing in his rowboat. It’s dark stuff, and the kind of thing it’s hard to imagine a major studio adapting a book with such serious subject matter at such a huge scale in these more mealy-mouthed, faux-progressive times. There’s a mature sincerity about the whole thing that really makes Holes stand out. 

I was quite taken with the way that all of the different narratives were eventually braided together into one larger, grander story. Eventually, after one piece of abuse from Dr. Pendanski too many, Zero hits his oppressor in the face with a shovel and runs off into the barren wasteland around Camp Green Lake, prompting the warden to tell her men to get rid of his files since, as a ward of the state, no one will be looking for him after her disappears. After a few days, Stanley takes off after him into the desert, eventually finding him camping out beneath onion man Sam’s overturned boat, where the younger boy has been managing to survive on jars of Kate’s spiced peaches, still preserved there after all this time. It’s from this vantage that Stanley spots a mountain peak that resembles a thumbs up and, recognizing it as “God’s thumb” from his great-grandfather’s survival story, the two of them make their way toward it. Zero almost doesn’t make it, but Stanley carries him the rest of the way to the top, where they discover one of Sam’s onion patches, still thriving, and regain their strength. Just as importantly, Stanley’s rescue of Zero has at last fulfilled the Yelnats family’s responsibility to the Zeronis, lifting their curse. Stanley teaching Zero to read likewise ensures that the latter is able to read the former’s name (or rather, Stanley I’s name) on the trunk that they unearth and keep it from falling into the warden’s hands. With her dying breath, Kate had told Trout that he and his children could dig for a hundred years and never find her treasure, and with the warden’s arrest upon the arrival of the Yelnats’s new lawyer and a couple of Texas Rangers (as it turns out, having a child prisoner with no record of him—Zero’s files were destroyed to cover up his presumed death—is bad news), Trout and his descendants wasted their lives on a treasure they never got to possess. At last, for the first time since Sam’s death, rain comes to Green Lake. 

This is an impressive film cinematically as well. The fades between the verdant Green Lake of the past and the dusty plain of the present that is featureless other than its thousands of holes are concise and effective visual storytelling. Zero and Stanley’s ascent of God’s Thumb is very convincing, full of very expensive looking helicopter shots, and it looks fantastic. The locations are, overall, gorgeously photographed, so that even the desolate area around the camp/prison looks beautiful. Never having seen the movie before, I always assumed based on the presence of LaBeouf, who was a Disney Channel sitcom performer at the time, that Holes would be on par with their direct-to-cable original movies, functional and utilitarian rather than thoughtfully arranged and aesthetically interesting. It has some weaknesses of that genre, notably in the film’s soundtrack, which is full of inspirationally titled tracks (“Keepin it Real,” “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday,” “Don’t Give Up,” etc.) that sometimes literally describe what we’re seeing on the screen, which feels like an over-explanatory narrative crutch for a film that otherwise trusts in its audience’s ability to pick up on nuance and subtlety. This extends to having the young actors perform a mixed hip-hop/pop track that plays over the film’s credits and is, respectfully, embarrassing. I probably saw the music video for it on television at the time of release, and that colored my perception of what I thought the movie was for a couple of decades, so I chalked up the frequent recommendations of it as little more than my peers’ nostalgia. I’m pleased to discover I was wrong. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Paris, Texas (1984)

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There are some major film-world names attached to the 1984 road trip drama Paris, Texas. If nothing else, it is the Harry Dean Stanton movie, the most memorable example of the notoriously unfussy character actor stepping into the leading-man spotlight. Even so, German model-turned-actress Nastassja Kinski threatens to steal the whole movie from under him in a just a couple scenes buried late in the third act; Kinski radiates enough It Girl beauty & cool that the film’s most iconic stills are of her modeling a pink sweater dress, not of Stanton wandering the American sands. German director Wim Wenders obviously looms large over the production as well, gawking at the dust & concrete vastness of the American landscape with the amazement of an astronaut exploring an alien planet. Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller puts in career-defining work here too, dwelling in the ombre gradients between the natural light of dusk and the neon glow of roadside motels. This is the kind of movie that’s so stacked with big, important names that even its credited Assistant Director, French auteur Claire Denis, is an art cinema icon in her own right. And yet, the name that was most on my mind while watching the film for the first time this week was American painter Edward Hopper, whose work’s melancholic sparseness is echoed in each of Wenders & Müller’s carefully distanced compositions, to great effect.

Of course, it turns out my association of this 40-year-old movie with one of this nation’s most accomplished fine artists was not an original thought. After the screening concluded, I immediately found an article titled “How Edward Hopper Inspired Wim Wenders, David Lynch, and More” that detailed Hopper’s artistic influence on Wenders in clear, direct language. Most importantly, it includes direct quotes from Wenders himself, who explained in his 2015 book, The Pixels of Paul Cézanne: and Reflections on Other Artists, “‘All the paintings of Edward Hopper could be taken from one long movie about America, each one the beginning of a new scene […] Each picture digs deep into the American Dream and investigates that very American dilemma of appearance versus reality […] [He] continually reinvented the story of lonely people in empty rooms, or couples who live separate lives together without speaking […] In the background are the impenetrable façades of a hostile town or an equally unapproachable landscape. And always windows! Outside and inside are the same inhospitable and unreal living spaces, radiating a similar sense of strangeness.’” I could have written the exact same thing about Paris, Texas that Wenders says about Hopper in those quotes. I just would have worded it in clumsier, less articulate phrasing.

Paris, Texas is a solemn 1980s road trip through Edward Hopper’s America, conveniently relocated to the great state of Texas via interstate highway. Harry Dean Stanton stars as a weary, severely dehydrated traveler. He seems to be operating under a magic spell that compels him to walk through the Mojave Desert until he forgets everything about himself and where he came from. When his estranged brother (sci-fi convention regular Dean Stockwell) rescues him from that aimless mission to wander his identity into oblivion, it takes days for him to rebuild his persona from the ground up. He has to relearn how to talk, how to dress, how to act around relatives, and so on — recovering one personality trait at a time until he can recall who he was before he fucked off into the desert for a four-year eternity. As soon as he remembers, he immediately wishes he could forget again. It turns out he chose to obliterate his former self, because that man was an abusive, alcoholic prick. It’s an epiphany that inspires one last road trip, as he attempts to make right by reuniting his young, abandoned son with the young, abandoned wife he used to physically abuse (Kinksi). The effort is bittersweet. It disrupts all of the healing that’s accumulated in the years of his absence just so he can seek some personal absolution, but his heart is at least in the right place, seemingly for the first time in his life.

Like many great movies, Paris, Texas is very slow, very sad, and very beautiful, with many humorous little grace notes throughout. As cute as it is to watch Stanton mimic Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp while bonding with his sweetheart son, the full weight of his past sins sits heavy on that memory by the final scene, when he abandons the boy a second time. Those sins also create an impenetrable barrier between him and Kinki’s mother figure. The former lovers can only communicate via phone on opposite sides of the peep show booth where she now works, barely able to stomach the sight of each other. Müller’s Hopper-inspired landscape photography underlines that isolation in every exterior. While these European filmmakers seem wryly amused with the fast food, billboard ads, and novelty roadside attractions that define American kitsch, they also emphasize the sparseness of the country’s sprawling landscape to portray the characters within as isolated, lonely, broken people. The Edward Hopper of it all is a studied observation of physical distance, where people are only connected to each other through long-reaching shadows, interstate concrete, and telephone wire. Even the wandering Stanton’s Norman Rockwell daydream of his reunited family is framed within a vast, vacant lot in the titular Texan town, where nothing awaits him but dust.

Paris, Texas screened at The Broad in New Orleans this week, presented as a new 4k restoration by Janus Films. It was the final screening in this year’s Gap Tooth Cinema program, which is now on break until the first week of January. The screening sold out early, then was moved to the cinema’s largest theater, then sold out again. Like most of my experiences with Gap Tooth’s programming, it was wonderful to see such a gorgeous picture for the first time so big & loud with such an engaged, respectful crowd. I recently put together a Letterboxd list of my favorite new-to-me film discoveries from this year, and Paris, Texas was just one of many titles I got to see theatrically thanks to Gap Tooth: namely, Black Narcissus, Nashville, High Heels, Juliet of the Spirits, The Lovers on the Bridge, and the ephemeral America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of. They’re doing great work, and if you live in New Orleans you should be making time for their screenings in your weekly schedule. Just, you know, please wait until I can purchase my ticket first.

-Brandon Ledet

My Christmas Wish: Treat Yourself to All That Heaven Allows (1955) This Year

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Last year, Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows made it to number 24 on Swampflix’s Top 100 films, so naturally I spent the evening of last Christmas Eve closing that blind spot. If you’re a weirdo like I/we am/are (and if you’re on this site, that’s probably the case), you’ll likely find yourself recognizing the plot from its contours, because what Star Wars is to Spaceballs, this movie is to John Waters’s Polyester. Since Brandon had already written a review years earlier, I repurposed the review I couldn’t stop myself from writing to save for this year as an earnest recommendation to spend some part of your Christmas season with Sirk too, on the 70th anniversary of Heaven’s release. 

Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is a well-off widow in New England. Her life is quiet, with visits from her two college-aged children Kay (Gloria Talbott) and Ned (William Reynolds) growing fewer and further between. Her best friend, Sara Warren (Agnes Moorhead), takes her out socially; attempts to get her to pair off with older widowers in their social circle are unsuccessful, as she feels no spark with any of them. One day, she realizes that some new hunk is tending to her landscaping, and he introduces himself as Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), the son of the late Mr. Kirby who was previously engaged as the Scott family’s arborist. When she visits him at his home, she learns that he sleeps on a cot in a room attached to the greenhouse, and when he mentions planning to tear down the old mill on the property, she cajoles him into giving her a tour of the long-abandoned building, and she encourages him to convert it into a livable home instead. As their romance burgeons, their love is represented in ongoing changes to the mill house, which comes to resemble a livable home more and more. Ron takes Cary to meet some of his friends, a couple who have given up on the lifestyle of trying to keep up with the Joneses in New York and now instead tend a tree farm. As the night goes on, a party erupts, and the couple introduces Cary to their bohemian friends: birdwatchers, beekeepers/artists, cornbread masters, and lobster-catchers. 

Cary has a wonderful, uninhibited time, but there’s trouble around the corner; her high society friends are rather snooty about her relationship, as are her children. When she mentions selling the house and moving in with Ron (post nuptials, of course), Ned becomes quite upset about his mother selling his childhood home and tells her that the “scandal” she’s bringing upon the family by dating someone who’s merely (upper) middle class could jeopardize his career options. The local gossip hound starts a rumor that Cary and Ron had been an item since before her husband died, which deeply upsets Kay, as she begs her mother to break things off with Ron. Everyone also seems to be utterly scandalized by their dramatically different ages. (Hudson was 30 and Wyman 38 at the time, and those are the ages that they appear to be to me, but the film may be trying to imply a greater disparity.) She acquiesces to the demands of her fairweather socialite friends and her ungrateful children, only to learn some months later that her sacrifice was in vain. Both of her children delay their Christmastime return to their hometown, and when they arrive, they reveal their own new life plans; Kay will be getting married to her beau in February when he graduates, and Ned will be leaving straight from his own graduation to take a position in Europe that will last, at minimum, a year. They present her with a Christmas gift that she doesn’t want (more on that in a minute), and Ned even suggests that they sell the house, since the kids won’t be needing it as their “home” any longer. Via a simple misunderstanding, Cary comes to believe that Ron is getting married to another woman, and the melodrama only unfolds further from there. 

Sirk is a Technicolor artist, and this is a gorgeous movie, and a very funny one at that. One of the things that I really loved about this cast was the opportunity to see Agnes Moorhead play a kinder, more sympathetic role. Just a couple days after watching this one I caught her name in the opening credits of Dark Passage and thought to myself, aloud, “That woman was working.” And, wouldn’t you know it, I tuned into the New Year’s Twilight Zone marathon on H&I just in time to catch her episode of that: 

Moorhead’s Sara Warren is the only real friend that Cary has, as she’s the one who encourages her to get back together with Ron when she sees just how heartbroken her friend is. We learn this in a scene that’s perfectly framed and is one of many pointed social critiques that the film makes. We cut to a shot of a housekeeper vacuuming a carpet, as the camera dollies backward through the doorway to the room in which Sara and Cary are talking, and Sara closes the door to shut out the noise so that the two women can converse. It’s a neat gag, but it plays into the overall social critique of the movie, in which even the most sympathetic member of the bourgeoisie is still an aristocrat shutting out her social inferiors, despite her softening her heart towards her friend’s desire to date a blue collar business owner. There’s also a great contrast between the country club cocktail party that Cary attends near the film’s opening scene and the lobsterfest that happens at Ron’s friends’ house, where the upper class is presented undesirably. A married man makes a pass at Cary, kissing her; a potential romantic interest tells her that there’s little need for passion at their age, to which she (rightfully) takes some offense; the town gossip queen is there to do her thing. Ron’s group’s party is a lively place, where he plays the piano and sings boisterously, and people dance with great fervor. It’s never commented upon, but it is present throughout. 

Another fun little tidbit about this one is its distaste for television. Early on in the film, Sara suggests that Cary get a television to keep her company now that the house is empty, which Cary finds to be a contemptible suggestion. When a television salesman sent by Sara calls upon the Scott household, Cary shoos him away in a huff. In the final insult, however, Cary receives a television set as a gift from her children for Christmas. Ned even reiterates that Cary will be lonely and unfulfilled without her children and should have something in the house to distract her from her pitiful solitude, as if he and his sister hadn’t done everything in their power to sabotage her relationship with Ron. After the children have gone off to do their own things, their mother is left alone in the house, lit only by the lights of the Christmas tree and a duplicate fire: one in the hearth and its mirror in the flat TV screen — the giver of warmth and its cold reflected image. It’s striking and memorable, and the relatively tiny window that the TV might give of the world is visually contrasted with the vivid Technicolor world just on the other side of the panoramic windows that Ron has installed into the home he built to share with Cary. It’s good stuff. 

The film doesn’t demand a winter or Christmas time frame to be viewed, but I think it works best in that context. I’m getting the word out now so you can put it on the calendar before we all get Christmas brained. And, while you’re at it, when was the last time you watched Polyester?

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Hamnet (2025)

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All of the advertising for and critical response to Chloé Zhao’s prestige-season adaptation of Hamnet will lead you to expect a much shallower film than what it actually is. Having not read the novel myself, I’ve so far only understood Hamnet to be the weepie version of Shakespeare in Love: an Oscar-bait Hollywood drama about the death of William Shakespeare’s young child, Hamnet, the tragedy that inspired him to write the near-eponymous play. The loudest critical responses to the film adaptation have either been in praise of or in resistance to the ways that actors Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley perform that parental grief as Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes Hathaway, respectively. I’m enough of a sucker for period-piece melodramas that I would’ve been onboard for that relatively small story about one historically famous couple’s version of art therapy, but the film turned out to be much grander & fuller in scope than that. It hits on much broader themes about how we’ve all lost a genuine, Pagan relationship with the natural world and how making art can be a form of witchcraft that brings us back to it. And it only manages to do so by primarily functioning as Agnes’s story, not William’s.

We meet Agnes & William as young no-namers who are violently in love but haven’t yet fully established their place in the world. As much as they adore each other, their individual natures pull them in separate directions. William’s theatrical ambitions draw him to a busy life in The Big City, while Agnes thrives in the country woods as far away from London as she can get. The central conflict is not so much the grief that couple suffers when they suddenly lose their child to illness, but the dissonance in how they personally process that grief after the fact. A falconer & herbalist who’s viciously rumored to be “the daughter of a forest witch,” Agnes is in tune with the natural flow of life & death, but that flow is frequently disrupted by civilized townsfolk who drag her out of the woods and into the unnatural rituals of Christian society. She’s neither allowed to give birth in the way that feels natural to her (alone, standing in the woods) nor grieve familial loss in her own way (directly, without averting her eyes). When her young son dies and her husband fucks off to the city to continue his work in the theatre, she perceives the abandonment as his own close-hearted rejection of life & nature, lumping him in with the phonies who won’t let her simply be herself in the woods because it’s not Proper Behavior. It isn’t until she sees the resulting play William names after their son that she understands that he can only grieve through his art, and that his act of creation on the stage is its own form of witchcraft — however foreign to hers.

The final act of Hamnet—when Agnes is reunited with and says goodbye to her dead son’s spirit through her husband’s art—is powerful stuff. It cuts right through the knee-jerk cynicism that usually prompts me to dismiss the Oscar-hopeful studio dramas that flood the release calendar this time of year. In particular, I was moved by a shot of Agnes looking up to the stage at her son’s dramatic ghost that mirrors earlier sequences of her looking up to the flying spirit of a deceased pet hawk, illustrating in a small gesture the separate but parallel magics she & her husband practice. It’s that tension between the old & modern ways that makes Zhao such a strong fit for the material. Her docudrama filmmaking style is incongruous with the costume drama genre, but her security-camera modernity clashes with the Old World natural setting in a way that echoes the spiritual divide between Agnes & William’s respective worldviews. The only times the movie loses its way, really, are the brief moments when Zhao strays from Agnes’s POV to catch up with how William is getting along in the city. There’s an especially corny reading of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy that temporarily breaks the movie’s spell as William works out his feelings on his own, but that’s less the fault of Paul Mescal’s performance than it is a misstep in intellectual rigor behind the camera. Hamnet is only truly about Hamlet in the final minutes when Agnes engages with that work from the audience pit, armed with Jessie Buckley’s trademark combative smirk. When it sticks with her, it soars. Thankfully, that accounts for most of the runtime.

-Brandon Ledet

Went the Day Well? (1942)

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Austin Film Society Cinema is currently programming a series entitled “Nope to Nazis,” consisting of films contemporaneous to Germany’s descent into nationalism and fascism, celebrating “the resilience of spirit deployed in opposition to these monsters” and their “authoritarianism, racism, and fraudulent populism.” The series contains some notable and well-known examples of films of this type, notably 1942’s Casablanca and 1940’s The Great Dictator alongside lesser-known examples, like John Farrow’s 1940 The Hitler Gang, which uses the framing of a gangster picture to show the rise of the titular monster and his ilk. All of these are American productions, but I was most intrigued by a British title that was new to me, Went the Day Well?, from 1942, directed by Alberto Cavalcanti. 

The film opens with an introduction and welcome to the quaint British village of Bramley’s End by local Charles Sims (Mervyn Johns), who shows us to a small gravestone in the village’s churchyard, upon which are written several German surnames. They came to claim Bramley’s End, he says, and this small plot of land in which they are buried is all that they managed to hold, with Sims’s narration clearly placing this framing device after the end of the war. From there we go “back” to the film’s contemporary setting of May 1942, which finds the village going about its end-of-week business under all the wartime restrictions, when several lorries (trucks for us on this side of the pond) arrive filled with soldiers who will need to be billeted in the town for exercises. The leader of the soldiers, Major Hammond (Basil Sidney) goes around town and meets the various prominent locals before surreptitiously rendezvousing with Bramley’s End’s local squire, a quisling named Oliver Wilsford (Leslie Banks, of the original The Man Who Knew Too Much). After all of the men, who are secretly German paratroopers, have been placed in homes about the village, the treachery is exposed, and we learn that they are tasked with using some kind of ultimate weapon which, upon Monday morning, will ensure that Hitler’s invasion of England cannot be repelled. Wilsford, as a double agent, is rounded up with the rest of the villagers in the town’s church while the children are taken to Bramley End’s large manor house to be held separately, under the care of Mrs. Fraser (Marie Lohr). Later, when the town’s vicar refuses to go along with the Nazis, telling them to their faces that they are an evil force and an affront to God, he is killed while attempting to ring the church bell to call for help. His daughter Nora (Valerie Taylor), in her “hysteria,” is sent to the manor house to help mind the captive children.

What follows are two days and nights of the villagers finding ways to resist and attempting to get news to the outside world of what is happening in Bramley’s End, with each moment of hope that arrives, those hopes are dashed. In order to prevent the neighboring towns from growing suspicious, the German soldiers force the village’s phone and telegram operators to remain in place, but at gunpoint. When two women manage to write a message on an egg, they manage to get a half dozen to the paperboy from the next town, but he’s run off of the road and his eggs are smashed when Mrs. Fraser’s cousin comes to the village for tea. Mrs. Fraser manages to entertain her cousin and get her back on the road, without the Germans ever seeing that she slipped a note into the visitor’s pocket, but said cousin merely uses the paper she finds in her pocket to try and stop her car window from rattling, and it blows away before it can ever be read. Courageous postmistress Mrs. Collins (Muriel George) manages to kill the guard assigned to her by throwing pepper in his face before attacking him with her kindling hatchet, but the switchboard operators in the next town over are too busy gossiping and badmouthing her to take the call before she’s caught in the act and shown the sharp end of a German bayonet for her troubles. 

The message throughout (because make no mistake, this is a propaganda film, even if it’s one where the lecture we get—Nazis are bad—is the morally correct one) is about the moral failures of laxity in wartime, even if you think that you’re far from the warfront. The whole thing could have been over more quickly and with far fewer casualties if it weren’t for the carelessness of individual citizens, multiple times over. The switchboard girls, Mrs. Fraser’s careless cousin (twice!), and even the hometown members of the Home Guard who hear the peal of the church’s bell and shrug it off all share their complicity with the treacherous Wilsford. Even Mrs. Fraser herself laughs off Nora’s concerns when she notices that the “British” soldiers were keeping score in their card game with “Continental” numbers, marked by elongated number fives, and she pays for it with her life, as she bravely grabs a German grenade and runs into the hallway with it to protect the children under her command as the Nazis advance on the manor house. Unusually for the time, the violence is rather explicit and shocking, certainly with the intent of driving home the dangers of failed vigilance. Mrs. Fraser does manage to save the village’s children, but the film does not spare us from seeing another boy shot by Nazi soldiers as he attempts to run to the next village for help. Dozens of men, women, and children are felled in this movie. The Home Guard are gunned down in the street; the father of one of the Home Guard boys is attacked from behind by Wilsford, having tagged along on an escape attempt in order to prevent its success; an old poacher is shot while attempting to help the aforementioned shot boy escape to the next town; Wilsford is shot in cold blood by Nora, who has figured him out and manages to stop him from unbarricading an entry point for the encroaching Nazis. It’s in black and white, but it sure is bloody. 

This one was admittedly a bit difficult to get into at first. We’re introduced to what feels like far too many people within the film’s opening minutes: milkmaids and milkmen, constables and vicars, telegraph operators and rabbit hunters. It’s a bit overwhelming, and the sudden appearance of the infiltrating soldiers, some of whom will be important later but who are indistinguishable from the rabble upon first sight, muddies things even further. I assume that there would have been obvious differences to the contemporary viewer between the uniforms of the soldiers needing to be billeted and the Home Guard who were going into the surrounding area for their own exercises, but those differences were lost on me. As a result, we have Germans disguised as British soldiers, all of them coming into Bramley’s End at the same time, while there are also actual British soldiers (technically militiamen), and it confuses some of the early plot points in the film. At the film’s climax, as the Germans attempt to wrest control of the manor house of Bramley’s End back from the locals who have successfully rebelled and holed up there, the cavalry finally arrives in the form of the neighboring villages’ own Home Guard (or maybe they’re proper British soldiers. As we’ve established, my eye is not trained to differentiate between them), but when those two opposing factions are fighting, I couldn’t properly tell you which was which. 

Regardless of those weaknesses, this was a very effective thriller, and that’s coming from someone who’s ultimately pretty apathetic to war films. It’s a kind of proto-Red Dawn, and the film is quite tense throughout as one winces over and over again upon seeing yet another failed attempt to call for help. Worth seeking out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Alpha (2025)

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As with most genre films, it’s tempting to discuss Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to her Palme d’Or-winning body horror Titane exclusively through points of comparison. Alpha is Julia Ducournau’s Tideland; it is Julia Ducournau’s Kids; it is Julia Ducournau’s 1990s time machine that only makes pitstops for scenes of vintage misery. The Tideland comparison is directly invited by the film itself, as Alpha is another fantasy-horror tale of a young child haunted by a close family member’s heroin addiction, in which the niece & uncle in that relationship take a beat to watch scenes from Tideland director Terry Gilliam’s better-respected title The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. The Kids comparison is indirectly invited earlier in the story, as we meet the titular 13-year-old-niece-in-peril while she’s unconscious at a high school house party and being tattooed with a dirty needle, exposing her to an illness referred to only as “The Virus.” Whereas Harmony Korine’s misbehaved-teens scare film intended to shock audiences with the seedy details of how HIV/AIDS was actively spreading through children’s unsupervised hedonism, Ducournau’s rearview vision can only grieve the lives lost during the scariest years of that viral spread, when information was as low as the likelihood for death was high. Alpha can’t help but feel a little out of step with the current moment as it dwells on those darkest days of the recent past, but the way it’s haunted by The Virus at least feels specific & personal to its director despite all its convenient points of comparison — especially by the time you do the math to figure out that she would’ve been her protagonist’s age around 1996.

One of the clearest ways Alpha is personal to Julia Ducournau is its visual interpretation of AIDS symptoms through body horror metaphor. In Raw, she depicted a young woman’s coming-of-age struggles through a skin-tearing cannibal transformation. In Titane, she tested the outer limits of familial machismo & gender identity through another monstrous transformation, that time forged in steel. In contrast, the bodily transformations of Alpha are much more solemn & subdued. Victims of The Virus gradually harden into gorgeous marble statues as they perish, coughing up sculptors’ dust in their last breaths before their final, agonized moments are set in stone. It’s a stunning effect that captures both the pain and the beauty of loved ones lost to disease, but it’s also one that deliberately backs away from the confrontational ferocity of Ducornau’s earlier works to instead seek a quiet sorrow. The film’s titular teenager (Mélissa Boros) is the daughter of a doctor (Golshifteh Farahani) who’s been surrounded by the fantastically painful effects of The Virus since its earliest days, most intimately through the slow physical decline of her drug-addict brother (Tahar Rahim). That wayward uncle happens to return home at the exact moment when Alpha is exposed to The Virus via tattoo needle, prompting the mother to worry about the parallels between the two people she loves the most as the family waits for her daughter’s test results. Those results will either foretell Alpha transforming into a human statue, frozen in time, or Alpha surviving long enough to live a full life. It’s a tough couple weeks’ wait, especially for an educated mother in the medical profession.

The worst you could say about Alpha is that it feels stuck in the past on an aesthetic level, somehow landing closer to the de-saturated digital filmmaking of the early 2000s (Tideland, et al.) than the 1990s misery dramas evoked in its themes (Kids, et al.). Ducournau’s earlier films felt like they were giving birth to some new monstrous beast not yet seen onscreen, while her latest finds her lost somewhere in the recent past, dissociated from the current moment. That temporal dissociation is at least appropriate for the film’s longform flashback structure, in which Farahani’s mother figure processes her daughter’s current health scare by reliving memories of her brother’s earlier days with The Virus. At first, those two timelines are clearly differentiated by color grading choices (warm tones for the past; cool, marbled tones for the present) and the respective curliness density of Farahani’s hairdo, but once the prodigal uncle returns to the fold they start to collapse into one simultaneous story. It’s a remarkably confusing narrative structure, but that confusion is somehwat the point. No matter how distanced the doctor gets from the most harrowing days of The Virus, she can’t help but bring the fears & anxieties of those times into the present. Ducournau is very likely making a point there about how survivors & witnesses of the HIV/AIDS epidemic reflexively carry the despair of those years into present-day illness crises (i.e., COVID), and she’s presumably counting herself among them. Whether it’s the point or not, though, the film does feel artistically dated, which is not typically something you can say of her work.

If there’s any current-moment film title Alpha can be easily compared to, it’s this year’s fellow Cannes-premiered oddity The Plague. Ducournau’s latest is paradoxically both more literal and more lyrical than Charlie Pollinger’s knockout debut, but they’re both coming-of-age stories about young nerds stigmatized by their peers for coming in direct contact with a fantastical virus that transforms their bodies. The influence of Ducournau’s own debut, Raw, visibly seeps into the waters of The Plague as the latter film’s fictional virus also manifests in itchy skin that victims habitually shred in an anxious reaction to social isolation. The overlap between Ducournau & Pollinger’s films then becomes uncanny in a pivotal moment when Alpha is bullied in her school’s swimming pool, mirroring the water polo camp setting of The Plague. Whereas The Plague conveys a sharpness in intent & execution, however, Alpha gets lost in its own made-up world & metaphor. In an early scene, Alpha’s classmates struggle to interpret the classic Poe poem “A Dream Within a Dream,” just as Ducournau invites her audience to struggle interpreting the linear timeline between her characters’ past & present through dream-within-a-dream storytelling logic. That temporal muddling ends up relegating the marbled body transformations of The Virus to the background as the character drama it threatens takes precedence, which is a letdown for anyone excited to see one of body horror’s best working auteurs once again do her thing. Instead, we find her searching for something in the haze of the past, making baffling aesthetic choices from scene to scene (not least of all in a few disastrously distracting needle drops) as she stumbles through a foggy memory.  I suppose I should be celebrating Ducournau for retreating further into personal preoccupation rather than delivering Titane 2.0 to dedicated fans, but I also can’t pretend that the result is as rewarding as her previous triumphs. Alpha is more satisfying to think about than it is to actually watch, which I can’t say about Raw, Titane or, for that matter, The Plague.

-Brandon Ledet

Sirāt (2025)

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“It’s been the end of the world for a long time.”

How do we continue to seek & experience pleasure while the world is actively ending all around us? I have no idea if that question was on director Oliver Laxe’s while he was making the new apocalyptic rave-scene drama Sirāt, but it was certainly on mine while watching it. In fact, it’s getting increasingly difficult to think about anything else these days, when simple, for their-own-sake pleasures are feeling less attainable and more amoral by the minute. The transient partiers of Sirāt have to selectively tune out constant news reportage about the start of World War III in order to enjoy their daily travels & pleasure hunts, stubbornly continuing their journey to the next big party on the horizon despite what the audience can only assume is an impending nuclear holocaust. From a distance, it may seem excessively selfish or hedonistic for them to continue raving on while the world is ending just outside their periphery, but it’s also difficult to imagine what a small crew of recreational drug users & dance music enthusiasts could possibly do to stop that apocalyptic momentum anyway, even if they were more politically engaged with the world outside their vans. The only two options they have, really, are to either helplessly fret their final hours away or to fill those hours with as many small, for-their-own sake pleasures as they can manage. In the immortal words of Andrew W.K., “When it’s time to party [i.e, to distract ourselves from impending doom and the ever-present desire to cry until we puke], we will always party hard.” Words to live by, I guess.

I do not want to imply that Sirāt‘s entire cast of characters is evaporated into a mushroom cloud at the story’s climax. WWIII is more of a background hum beneath their constant soundtrack of techno beats than it is a direct threat on their lives. If they are in any mortal danger, it’s due to their personal choices, not global circumstances. The film opens in the vastness of the Moroccan desert, with unnamed party promoters erecting enormous speaker towers in the sand like Kubrick’s monolith. When thunderous bass starts pumping through those speakers, a crowd of ravers materialize to party the hours away, dancing up a dust cloud to a nonstop techno track. The only interlopers among them are a middle aged, working-class dad (Sergi López) and his young son, who pass out “Missing Person” flyers in an attempt to track down a member of their family who hasn’t returned home in a half-year’s time. When military troops breaks up the party, the out-of-place father & son duo decide to follow the biggest risk-taker ravers to a second rave even deeper in the desert, risking their lives for the possibility of staging a family reunion. Meanwhile, the more hardcore ravers are risking their lives for the pure thrill of the risk. As the makeshift convoy journeys towards the Promised Land rave deeper in the desert, the film starts hitting thriller genre beats more reminiscent of a Sorcerer or a Fury Road than the small character drama beats it hits in the opening stretch. Shit gets real. People get hurt. And yet, their lives still feel small & inconsequential within the context of the larger global catastrophe being set in motion just outside the frame.

Despite the lethal stakes of Sirāt‘s scene-to-scene drama and apocalyptic setting, the movie can be oddly sweet. It’s a character drama at heart, one populated by real, believable people with real-life faces of interest — as opposed to the perfectly sculpted plastic faces of its Hollywood studio equivalents. The European ravers each speak multiple languages; they gradually assimilate the misguided father & son into their own found family; and they wax poetic about the simple joys of taking drugs to techno music, explaining to the befuddled, “It’s not for listening; it’s for dancing.” The fact that tragic things happen to them on the road (and that their world is doomed regardless) is an inevitability beyond their control. All they can do is party in the present and hope to survive long enough to party again in the future, often with open disdain for reminiscing about the past. The up-close details of their lifestyle are entirely alien to me, as I neither take the right drugs nor listen to the right music to fit into the raver scene they inhabit. Their collective impulse to seek small sensory pleasures in a world that’s actively collapsing around them should resonate with anyone who’s had the misfortune of being alive & aware this century, though, regardless of the futility in their pursuit. Not for nothing, their search for the next big party in the Moroccan wilderness is also strangely reminiscent of how I dream, when my unconscious mind is constantly sorting through a chaotic assemblage of fictional, self-generated obstacles while I’m trying to make my way to a dreamworld concert, party, or film screening that doesn’t actually exist.

-Brandon Ledet

Die My Love (2025)

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There is a fight for authorship at the center of the mental-crisis drama Die My Love that drives most of its scene-to-scene tension. The project was initiated by its star, Jennifer Lawrence, after Martin Scorsese forwarded the source-material novel to her as a potential showcase for her acting talents. Indeed, Lawrence gets to run wild in the resulting movie adaptation of that book, the most violently expressive she’s been on screen since 2017’s mother! — no small feat. Somewhere in the process of adapting the book, however, Lawrence hired an equally ferocious authorial voice in Lynne Ramsay to direct. Instead of adapting a novel about postpartum depression, it appears Ramsay has pulled a fast one and adapted those Britney Spears knife-dancing videos to feature length instead, doing as much as she can to abstract & rattle the text until it is no longer recognizable as anything other than a Lynne Ramsay picture. Die My Love touches on all of Ramsay’s greatest hits—the feral playground brutality of Ratcatcher, the illustrated-mixtape rhythms of Morvern Callar, the mother-in-crisis chills of We Need to Talk About Kevin, the curdled social isolation of You Were Never Really Here—but it has to contend with a new disruption to the way she normally does things: an unrestrained Jennifer Lawrence. Typically, Ramsay’s filmmaking style is overtly intense while her protagonists convey a calm, quiet surface to onlookers, with their inner turmoil saved for the audience’s horror. Here, Lawrence is the loudest, brashest, most chaotic presence in every room, matching Ramsay’s firepower with her own histrionic arsenal, so that all eyes are constantly on her. It’s difficult to say whether either of those two voices overpower the other here, but the tension between them is undeniably compelling.

That tense creative partnership between actor & director is echoed in the onscreen marriage between Die My Love‘s two leads: JLaw & RPats. The young couple start off well enough in the early stretch when they’re nesting in their new rural Montana home, routinely getting wasted and fucking on every possible surface. That ferocious animal attraction fades once Lawrence is nursing the inevitable baby they make together, with Robert Pattinson’s husband figure finding an increasing number of excuses to spend time outside of the house “for work.” Lawrence’s mental health rapidly plummets as she raises their baby in extreme isolation, due partly to postpartum depression but due largely to the soul-crushing boredom of being left alone in the house. The barking dogs, buzzing flies, and baby-appropriate novelty songs that fill that house’s void are enough to drive anyone insane after a few months of solitude, and that’s before you consider the wild hormonal swings the human body suffers after giving birth. For Ramsay’s part, she mimics the “chopped up” mental state of postpartum mothers in her trademark dissociative editing style, which helps abstract a fairly typical romantic-drift-apart story into the more experiential nightmare of a woman on the verge. Meanwhile, Lawrence lashes out at how “fucking boring” the universe is by literally clawing at the walls of her new prison/home and begging her husband to fuck her like he used to, proving that she’s still a person to him and not just a baby-making appliance. She follows through on every intrusive thought that might break her out of the domestic pattern she’s doomed to repeat, including jumping through sliding glass doors just to feel something. If Die My Love were made by any other director you’d expect those violent shocks to be momentary fantasies (see: last year’s Nightbitch), but since it’s Lynne Ramsay we know to accept the worst at face value and brace for the fallout.

Not every moment in Die My Love is tension & strife. Lawrence’s mother-in-crisis finds a surprise source of patience & grace in her neighboring mother-in-law, played by Sissy Spacek. While the younger mother is suffering through the maddening isolation that follows bringing a new life into this world, the older mother is suffering the maddening isolation of watching a loved one leave this world. As she grieves the recent loss of her own husband (Nick Nolte), Spacek slips into a similar self-destructive trance as Lawrence, and the two women only find moments of peace in the monochrome moonlight while the rest of the world is asleep — unlikely common ground. Sissy is an inspired casting choice for the part, since her historic woman-on-the-verge performance in Carrie is just as core to the driven-mad-by-the-patriarchy canon as the more often-cited works of Gena Rowlands & Isabelle Adjani. Even within that looming context, Lawrence admirably holds her own here, even steamrolling the dependably off-putting Pattinson in her own unpredictable, unhinged antics. Ramsay is somewhat accommodating in her role behind the camera, allowing for a little more storytelling conventionality than is typical to her work (imagine, for instance, if Morvern Callar was hospitalized for depression instead of fucking off to a rave). There are a few harmonic moments when the star and director are working perfectly in collaboration to illustrate a young mother’s frazzled mental state. It’s arguable, though, that the movie is at its most compelling when those two creative voices are fighting for dominance, with both the acting and the filmmaking reaching such top-volume kettle whistles that it’s difficult to parse out any specific grace notes from one or the other. They’re both screaming for your attention, and the result is effectively maddening.

-Brandon Ledet