Trey Edward Shults doesn’t do things small. His last film, the increasingly-relevant It Comes At Night, is one of the finest depictions of social isolation and paranoia of the entire 2010s, and that effect came about through a combination of lung-invading atmosphere and an uncanny eye for acting talent. And his latest is no different, pushing even further in visual ambition and emotional impact to make for one of the hardest hits of the year.
The first thing that struck me while watching this was Drew Daniels’ cinematography. Employing a style of near-perpetual motion, whirling in circles inside a car and continually following its main characters as they push forward through life, it makes for a nice break from the standard back-and-forth camera work that so populates the mainstream these days. Admittedly, some of that appears here too, but it’s a side dish compared to the main that is the energetic camera.
And the images captured range from the uplifting to the harrowing, stacking most of its chips on the latter. Hazy washes of colour to serve as scene transition, soul-burning stares down the camera lens, police lights like burning red eyes poking out of the blur; it’s an eerie atmosphere that banks on peeling back the brains of the main characters, and when combined with the terrific acting on display, it accomplishes just that in spades.
There’s also the soundtrack to consider… and fucking hell, is this a soundtrack worth talking about. The original compositions by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are all well and good, but these needle drops are something else entirely. Shults reportedly wrote the script with a lot of the music choices in mind (as annotated by Shults himself here), and the way they meld with the mixing and visual design is staggering. A lot of Frank Ocean cuts, A$AP Rocky’s LVL synced-up to an MRI machine, Amy Winehouse and Tyler The Creator as musical mile markers for the most depressing points of a relationship; as someone who loves a good needle drop, I can’t help but be massively impressed by the catharsis afforded by the picks here.
And indeed, ‘catharsis’ is the film’s main mode of communication, as its depiction of a family before, during, and potentially after a crisis is premium soul-crush material. Starting out as a look at Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr. at his absolute best to date), a high schooler hoping to get a wrestling scholarship, whose spiral into utter breakdown is as tragic as it is horrifying in all its implications. Some of it boils down to the immense pressure placed on him by his father (Sterling K. Brown), some of it is the tumult between him and his girlfriend (Alexa Demie), and some of it comes from how hard he pushes himself to succeed, even when he puts his own body and mind at risk in the process. It just builds and builds, applying more coats of raw angst onto the frame, until CRACK! The breakdown resolves, and everything (and everyone) that led up to that moment shatters like glass.
Then the second half kicks in, where Tyler’s sister Emily (Taylor Russell) and the rest of his family are left to pick up the pieces. It loses some of its steam with that transition, going directly from Tyler's point-of-view to Emily's, but that transition still feels like it’s needed to tell this story. A first half all about the downward spiral, and a second about the attempt to collectively crawl back out of it. The way it deals with notions of guilt, forgiveness, pressure, and even masculinity writ large, manages to dodge any potential feelings of exploitation that could arise from a white writer/director telling a predominantly black story. As a white person myself, bear in mind that I’m not trying to speak for anyone with that assessment; it’s just that, having seen shit like Antebellum this same year, this doesn’t even come close to feeling as profoundly out-of-touch as something like that.
This is not an easy film to watch, even on the basis that it isn’t meant to be easy. It is a brutal, almost punishing, experience in just how uncompromising it is. But because the film craft is so finely-tuned, the acting is on-point across the board, and the soundtrack is like teenaged experience made manifest, it earns every heart-stop but also every moment of quieter revelation and acceptance.
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