October 13, 2020
This was one of those Netflix films which debuted early last month that did not really attract me to watch because of the depressing title and the unfamiliarity of the lead actors. Furthermore, the running time of a two-hours is intimidating for what seemed to be a very heavy drama. However, when there was rising buzz for potential Oscars in its future, particularly for its adapted screenplay, made me decide to check it out for myself.
The story centered on a young woman (Jessie Buckley) who wanted to end her six-week relationship with her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons). However, she still agreed to go with Jake for a long drive out of the city on that cold snowy day to visit his parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) in their farmhouse. On the drive going there, they recite morbid poetry to each other. When they reached the farm, Jake brought her to the barn first, and told her about their pig which just died after being infested with maggots.
In the house, she had awkward conversations with Jake's strange parents, whom we see transition back and forth from normalcy to dementia. On their drive home in a strong blizzard, she and Jake got into even stranger situations as they bought ice cream to eat in the car, turned off the main road to look for a garbage bin, argued about the holiday tune "Baby It's Cold Outside" in a parking lot and went after a janitor working inside Jake's old high school.
From the very start, we know this was not going to be an ordinary movie. You immediately feel that this was going to be a movie with a lot of talking. There would be long conversations within the confines of a car. There would be a long exchange of poetic lines between Jake and her about very depressing topics in the car. At this point, things still made sense and I could still follow all the words they were saying, I thought.
However, the tone of the film changed when she met Jake's parents. The whole episode in the house were a jumbled-up collection of conflicting scenes and conversations despite the fact that these were all happening within the different rooms of the same house, supposedly within the same night. Everything they were talking about was all twisted and disturbing, I frankly could not figure out why these incoherent scenes were edited together this way.
The drive back to the city got more and more bizarre as the scenes and the conversations went along in the car, at the window of the ice cream shop and the high school premises. By then you have already been invested so much in the girl and Jake, but at what was supposed to be the climax, they were replaced by dancers doing interpretative contemporary ballet about them as a couple but this time, with the Janitor as a third party (huh?).
By the time we reached that awards ceremony at the end, we really do not know what was actually happening anymore. We are left on our own to surmise what all of that meant. Was this whole thing someone's vivid dream, or maybe a someone's dying hallucination? If you had been patient enough to go through the entire closing credits, there was a scene showing a car buried under a blanket of snow. By then, your brain will piece the whole thing together.
The whole film was one big cryptic puzzle. We never really knew how they met or how their relationship went or ended. We do not even know the girl's name, as we hear her being called Lucy, Louise, Lucia and even Ames. The ending was just as wide open to interpretation as it can be. There is that irresistible compulsion to connect all these disparate parts into your own cohesive whole to make sense of everything you've seen. You may even want to seek out Iain Reid's novel of the same title upon which this screenplay was adapted.
This type of film is definitely not for everyone. But they way the actors were so committed in their portrayals of their weird characters and how writer-director Charlie Kaufman assembled its oddly convoluted parts, this film still had a compelling charm about it. Like the previous films he wrote like "Being John Malkovich" (1999), "Adaptation" (2002) and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2002), Kaufman again presented the viewer with a challenging conundrum to figure out for themselves. 7/10.
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