It’s a tough watch, broken down into four acts punctuated by long static stretches of dialogue exchanged in the claustrophobic setting of a car traveling lonely roads under heavy snowfall. But its long stretches of nonlinear philosophical rumination, its enigmatic allusions to a mostly unspecified tragedy, and the contextual void in which the action takes place make it largely resistant to the standard structural dynamics of cinematic narrative.ĭigging into his trademark toolbox with more concern for honoring the material than making life easy for his audience, Kaufman has probably made as complex and audaciously loopy a film as admirers of Reid’s novel could have desired. Its baseline narrative is straightforward enough - a young man takes his relatively new girlfriend to meet his parents at the remote farmhouse where he grew up. The seemingly impossible-to-adapt source material is categorized as a literary thriller.
Tackling Canadian author Iain Reid’s 2016 debut novel, Kaufman set himself another challenge that would defeat most screenwriters. In his Oscar-nominated screenplay for Spike Jonze’s 2002 film, Adaptation, Kaufman turned his struggles to whittle a script out of the nonfiction Susan Orlean book The Orchid Thief into a dizzying meta-plunge into the creative process.
It sinks its claws in early on and never retracts them. That invention of hope surfaces intermittently - in fragments of forced cheer and embattled optimism, glimmers of happier times past or imagined futures, in a corny ice-cream jingle or even a rapturous dream ballet lifted from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (The intoxicating score by Jay Wadley ingeniously riffs on 1950s advertising and lush romantic musicals in those latter cases.) But the underlying melancholy is pervasive.
“Other animals live in the present, humans cannot, so they invented hope,” says the female protagonist played with gnawing dread by Jessie Buckley, first identified as Lucy and then by several other names throughout.
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