After briefly talking about Alison Brie in my last review, I figured it’d be worth checking out her latest starring role today as well. And man, was I thrown for a loop; she is straight-up unrecognisable in this thing. I mean, I literally just watched her on the big screen just a few hours earlier, and yet seeing her in this, I had to keep reminding myself that this is the same actress who first caught my attention in Sleeping With Other People. And the content itself is reflective of that, both in that it’s a marked departure from her more comedic work, and that it’s largely about surreal disconnects from reality. Namely, her own.
In this indie drama with the Duplass Brothers seal of approval, Brie stars as Sarah, a worker at a crafts store who finds herself in the middle of some… strange events. People she only met in dreams are showing up outside her work, strange voices at home when she’s alone, time slipping away without her noticing; something’s going on, and she’s struggling to figure out what it is.
And what it is isn’t anything as fantastical as alien abduction or time displacement or cloning; it’s mental illness. It is genuinely harrowing just how much Brie is giving into this performance, making the audience feel every point in her descent, aided by the nightmarish cinematography and set design. Its approach to psycho-drama banks on sticking to her warped perspective, meaning that she takes the audience along for quite a ride as we try to parse out what’s really happening and what’s just in her head.
It’s a quite engrossing watch, and watching the conspiratorial Sarah trying to make sense of what she’s seeing and hearing feels like I’m getting into the head of people I used to mock the hell out of back in the day. There’s a reason why GodLike Productions is my go-to synonym for ‘place where the crazies congregate’, and after this, I feel slightly shittier for that mentality.
But with that said, there’s something about this film’s framing that rubs me the wrong way. It’s not the juttering pace, where it feels like the first two-thirds are just accelerating into the truly-surreal finale, but more the depiction we get of Sarah’s schizophrenia. Maybe it’s because I still have Words On Bathroom Walls fresh in my memory (and as with most things in life, cinema is my main frame of reference for things, so bear with me as I likely fuck this up), but the way this film only focuses on the descent feels a bit… off. It’s a little too whimsical in a lot of places to really have the right effect, as if we’re watching a Manic Pixie Dream Girl ending up where MPDGs would rationally end up in the real world: An institution.
It comes across as strangely romanticised, with the note it ends up being so open-ended that it basically amounts to ‘She’s fucked now, thanks for watching’. For all the credit I can give to the reality-bending imagery, like Sarah is cutting into the fabric of the universe, and Brie’s performance which is definitely a personal highlight as far as raw talent goes, the overall approach to mental health feels like the wrong side of indie sensibilities where, in the process of capturing moments as they happen, it ends up missing the point of why these moments are being shown.
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