This film hurts to watch. Not in the sense that it’s bad (far from it, as I’ll get into), but because it is an incredibly visceral representation of an equally visceral reaction to stressful social situations. Or, for quite a lot of people out there (myself included), social situations in general. It’s one of the shorter films I’ve looked at this year (about 78 minutes including credits), and its premise is a seemingly simply one. It involves college student Danielle (Rachel Sennott) attending shiva, along with her extensive extended family, and just happening to bump into Max (Danny Deferrari)… who is also her sugar daddy. Cue the panic.
The premise and general stakes within all say “drama”, but everyone on the technical side of things are responding with “horror”, as this has the kind of aesthetic quality that proper genre films would kill to get. Cinematographer Maria Rusche uses the setting of a very cramped household to push for a claustrophobic, damn-near suffocating atmosphere that takes up the majority of the film’s run time. Every shot that Danielle is in emphasises just how many other people are around her, pulling the audience in nice and close to the point where you keep expecting the lens to be fogged up by the breath of at least three other people at any given time.
Hanna A. Park’s editing adds to that effect, accentuating the lack of breathing room in that house with just as little breathing room between conversations and general movement on-screen. The bulk of the film takes place in real-time, and it feels like it. But the MVP on the production side of things here has to be Ariel Marx’s soundtrack work. This is where the film’s cred as horror in disguise really shines through, plucking and clicking away to punctuate every dread-filled moment (and there’s a lot of them to be found in here), on top of some very tense strings.
But this is all in presentation. What the film is using it to convey is just as tense and genuinely tough to watch, but in a way that feels rewarding for doing so. I admit to being Gentile and not knowing a whole lot about the Jewish faith in terms of its practices and traditions… but connecting the dots with other predominantly-Jewish films I’ve seen, there’s definitely some stuff I can recognise here. It functions on the same anxious wavelength as a Safdie brothers production, the weight of cultural and especially familial expectations align with the depressed resignation of A Simple Man, and it certainly brings out the more horrifying ideas underlining a relatively simple aspect of Jewish tradition like The Vigil did. Hell, it reaches a higher point of morbid humour if you know that shiva is supposed to take place over a whole week (thank you, This Is Where I Leave You, for adding that to the mental rolodex).
But primarily, the sheer effort made into putting the audience right in Danielle’s shoes, making them feel every single foot that steps on them over the course of this story, is what truly makes this work. The forced pleasantries, the cloying infantilisation, the merciful chance to get a breath of fresh air outside; I found it rather impossible to not get drawn right into every single moment this film has to offer. This isn’t necessarily a film to be ‘enjoyed’, although there is still plenty of tension-breaking chuckles to be had with this, but more to be experienced. It offers a very up-close-and-personal perspective on Jewish family tradition, its take on bisexuality is a much-needed reprieve from the BS that still pervades so much of the mainstream (Danielle rebutting her mother's claims that she's just "experimenting" is some certified queen shit), and as a depiction of social anxiety, it’s nigh-on indispensable.
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