Rating: C
Dir: Cory Choy
Star: Audrey Grace Marshall, Stacey Weckstein
This is well beyond a slow-burn. Indeed, it makes a glacier look like Speedy Gonzales. It may be a “continental drift” burn, that’s about the pace at which it moves. If you don’t reach the end with more questions than answers, than you may simply not have been paying attention. Which might be the best way to get through this, to be honest. You could then write off issues as a result of your inattention, because otherwise, its inability to commit could be very irritating. However, I will say, it looks stunning. For a budget of ninety thousand dollars, it resets the bar, and any other movies with similar resources are going to have to up their game. There’s no excuse any more.
This is basically a two-hander. Hannah (Marshall) takes her daughter, Esme (Weckstein), into the woods to visit the old family home, now long-abandoned. It’s not long before we begin to sense something is wrong here, though exactly what is kept deliberately vague. Hannah has clearly been through some traumatic event in the past, involving a now-lost sister, Emily. She seems to be literally trying to dig up the past, uncovering various artifacts from bygone times, not all of which are pleasant. If there’s a concrete lesson to take away from this, it might be: do not eat jars of preserved peaches you find lying around in abandoned houses. Nothing good is likely to come from such a meal.
Indeed, I wonder if everything thereafter was a hallucination caused by ergot on the peaches. [Is that a thing? I should probably Google it…] Except the weirdness was already in progress by that point, so it was likely just food poisoning. There’s a whole series of other things to take into consideration, such as the annotated copy of Jane Eyre which Esme finds in the house. What does it mean? Fucked if I know – a phrase which would be a credible review of the whole endeavour, if only it did not fall about 496 words short of my usual target. Hanna’s digging intensifies, and she begins to see a little girl lurking in distance. Could it be the ghost of Emily? Sure. Why not? Might as well be.
It’s clear Choy is trying to say something about something. Probably grief, along with the mother-daughter relationship. One of the few elements which was clear to me, was how Esme continued to trust her mother, after the point when any external observer would be calling Child Protective Services. Otherwise? Yeah: FiIk. It survives on the strength of the imagery, and solid performances from the two leads. Though there are times when Esme sounds eight going on forty. So maybe she doesn’t exist. Maybe Emily never existed either. Perhaps the whole forest is just inside Hannah’s mind. The director is a figment of her imagination. I made the entire film up. There is no such website as Film Blitz. I don’t ex…