Would someone moved by the familial bonds honored onscreen also be encouraged to reconsider the larger carceral system? Or would they simply judge the fathers for making “bad decisions” that keep them from their children?
Just as Hitchcock noted that the best suspense comes from letting the audience in on the secret, Shyamalan forces the viewer to wait, wonder, and witness as Trap’s villain protagonist navigates his escape from the trap that has been set for him.
Understandably the film’s directors, Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber, are not interested in the inherently comic potential of their material, even if they cite Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove as an influence. After all, people, this is no laughing matter.
The debut feature of writer-director India Donaldson pivots on a young woman’s realization that it is sometimes wisest to keep those we love at an arm’s length.
The narrative framing echoes that of Lake Mungo and other mockumentaries, the events having already taken place, the yarn unspooled by an unseen director and editor, with the found footage elements appearing less as real-time documentation than forensic evidence.
Like all cultural practices, film acting is a historical palimpsest: new affects, tones, and gestures jostle with older ones, and what makes something feel contemporary is often a matter of some contingency.
No longer confined to their home countries, its characters practically teleport between locations, their paths crisscrossing in ways that quickly become impossible to track. Across the runtime, individuals relate dreams, hallucinations, and memories of things that we’ve already seen or will see.
You do not need to know that the filmmaker was inspired by the story of Oedipus to pick up on the evocation of this power of tragedy, or the setting in a heightened, mythic Greece. The film has an elemental strangeness that feels close to the world that ancient tragedy depicts: we see a forest, we see water, we see blood.
Kinds of Kindness presents us with a world of women living at the mercy of petty men. But the men don’t seem to know what they’re doing either. There’s a childlike nature to all the male characters, driven by the desire to get what they want and be respected in order to keep their egos intact.
Last Summer is not so much a provocation or the immersion in perversion that those who know only of the logline and Breillat’s career might be led to believe. This is a master class in emotional precision.
Lacey is our observer, but we sense that she does not really want to be. She tries to penetrate her mother’s sadness, but remains outside the adult world of her lovers and friends, pains and longings.
What distinguishes the film from a slew of other indie dramas, though, is how this conflict unfolds not just in spoken dialogue, but in the creak of the floorboards, muffled conversation through thin walls, the hum of the radiator.
Eschewing traditional methods of exposition like dialogue and voiceover, Hvistendahl reveals character relationships and plot primarily through meticulous attention to audio and visual details.
Forgoing any touristic impulse, Patiño takes his cues from filmmakers such as Peter Hutton and especially Mark LaPore, charting not only the people and places before him but also his fundamental distance from those environments.