1 day ago
7
Brad Ingelsby, creator of TV’s Mare of Easttown, has written an enticing-looking suspense thriller which Michael Pearce directs and Ridley Scott co-produces. And with the acting A-team of Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney in the leads, and rock-solid support from Fiona Shaw and Domhnall Gleeson, things look promising. But Sweeney is absent from the drama for too long for the central relationship to be satisfyingly dramatised. And after an intriguing opening, the convoluted narrative doesn’t merely jump the shark but lies down and lets the shark jump over it before the pair of them charleston their way across the rolling Pennsylvanian farmland where the film is supposed to be set.
Moore plays Kate, a lonely and unhappy grieving woman who trains horses and gives riding lessons on the farm she now precariously owns. She is divorced from a testy and judgemental lawyer called Richard (Kyle MacLachlan), and the woman she subsequently married has died. She gets some companionship from her no-nonsense neighbour and pal Jessie (Shaw). But the one light in her life is her beautiful, smart but fatally spoiled daughter Claire (Sweeney), who is a screwup and drug abuser for whom Kate has lavished all her money on pointless rehab programmes.
One night Claire comes back into Kate’s life, poutingly asking for help, and Kate finds herself encountering a very scary dealer of her daughter’s acquaintance. This is the odious Jackie Lyman (Domhnall Gleeson). When things get very nasty and have to be concealed from the police, Kate must decide how far she will go to protect her daughter.
There is some enjoyable and creepy business involving a local lake which can be pressed into service as a disposal area for corpses – the movie put me in mind of lake-centred films such as Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s under-remembered 2001 thriller The Deep End with Tilda Swinton, and classics like John M Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven from 1945, or George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun from 1951. But then the film gets mired in some very credulity-stretching stuff about what has to happen when bodies need to be recovered and the twisty finale is overwrought and silly. The estimable cast all do their utmost but the overall effect is frustratingly implausible.
