Three new films opening in Australian cinemas on July 9.
A WHITE, WHITE DAY
In Cinemas July 9th
* * * * 1/2
From Iceland comes the staggering A White, White Day, Hlynur Pálmason’s follow-up to his acclaimed and award-winning debut Winter Brother, featuring a once-in-a-lifetime role for the great Ingvar Sigurdsson, who nails every moment as a widowed grandfather and policeman building a house for his daughter and granddaughter while quietly losing his mind. Some of the technical attributes of the film are mind-blowing, and Pálmason is unafraid to stick his neck out with some extremely bold directorial choices.
SHIRLEY
* * 1/2
You’ll have come for above-the-title star Elisabeth Moss, Madeline’s Madeline director Josephine Decker, or subject Shirley Jackson, the acclaimed author of The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived In The Castle and ground-breaking New Yorker short story The Lottery, but you’ll stay for Odessa Young, the magnificent young Australian actor here playing Rose, a young expectant mother in 1950s Vermont, who accompanies her academic young husband to a university position and an entanglement with the acclaimed author Jackson and her creepy academic husband Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg).
There’s more than a little Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf going on here, but played out over around a year rather than a night. None of it is even remotely pretending to be biographical; based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, it’s a fantasia with a real person at its centre, in the style of that person’s own art. Decker’s previous films have all smelled gothic, and Jackson, a gothic modern author, would seem to suit her style (and it’s a very specific style), but Jackson’s work was far weirder and darker than Decker’s film. It’s not without its own dark, weird charm though, and Young’s performance is compelling enough to see you through.
WAVES
In Cinemas July 9th
* * *
Trey Edward Shults follows up Krisha and It Comes At Night with a suburban epic of turbulent trials within a black Miami family. Kelvin Harrison Jr. gives a raw, energetic performance as Tyler, a high school wrestling champ with pro-career potential who is hiding an injury and, ultimately, a pain-killer addiction, a set of secrets that spiral into all sorts of drama. Shults really goes to town stylistically, utilising a frenetic camera and outrageously saturated colours, and an overwhelming song score by contemporary R&B and rap artists such as Drake, Kanye West and Frank Ocean. It’s deliberately over the top, melodramatic, even gaudy, but those same big swings make it dynamic, vital and compelling. You can enjoy the whole, even if some moments can’t help but raise eyebrows and slacken jaws.
It’s the difficult third album. After the gem-like perfection of Krisha and the lean precision of It Comes At Night, Waves is beautiful but messy. It is so fantastically ambitious, and in being so, often rides a dangerous line between audacity and indulgence. But Shults is a true indie auteur, he’s got a voice, and if he’s got the guts to keep making things like this then who am I not to keep seeing them? He’s letting it all hang out here, letting the edges bleed, making a structural choice that knowingly forbids the film any chance of being considered formally perfect, and if some individual scenes miss the mark, the whole achieves nobility.
