I didn’t see Kornel Mundruczo’s last movie, Olympia, but I saw the one before that, the absolutely harrowing White God, the story of a loving and affectionate stray dog and his abuse-filled journey into becoming a vicious killer. Now we have this one, the story of a woman struggling with grief after the death of her newborn baby. I have to say that Mundruczo is really carving out a niche in the “emotionally punishing” arena of film.
This movie really is a marvel, if you can take it. Early in the film, there’s a very long single take of the main character and her partner going through their home birth process. It’s an exercise in tension and dread building; unlike the characters, we know things are going to go bad and watching the situation slowly escalate and then seem to get better and then escalate again and so on is absolutely harrowing. This scene could easily be a short film all on its own and it’s really arresting and shocking. The rest of the film is less technically daring, but it’s still a punishing watch. The cast is lead by a magnificent Vanesse Kirby. I was a bit late to the Kirby hype train; I first saw her in the latest Mission Impossible and, while a lot of people said she was a standout element, I thought she was just, you know, kind of okay. But her performance here is a masterwork. The film allows her to pull back from the easy choices. This isn’t a movie where you watch a woman cry for two hours; she’s operating at the level of a kind of dead numbness and, in a take on grief that felt very true to me, when she does feel something or allow an emotion to crack her cold façade, it’s always anger. It’s a bold decision; it’s a performance that could alienate a lot of people, make Martha, her character, be unlikable and unfeeling. And, honestly, she is at times both of those things and I loved that the movie didn’t sanitize her character. She engages in some really cruel behavior at times, obviously because she’s so mentally and emotionally devastated by the tragedy she’s suffered, but the film doesn’t exonerate her based on that or say that what she sometimes does or say is healthy, either for her or the people around her. The supporting cast is also very good. Shia LeBeouf, who seems to be going through yet another backlash at the moment, is raw and desparate as the father of the baby; he’s a tough guy, not entirely comfortable with explicit expressions of love,though, when the movie begins, he certainly does love Martha. But as the grief works its way into his heart, he becomes a more and more toxic character, self-destructive and perpetually on the verge of total collapse. Ellen Burstyn, as Martha’s mother, is excellent as she always is. A word for Molly Parker who plays the midwife in the film’s birth scene. It’s a small part, but it calls for a series of intense emotional shifts and she’s absolutely brilliant. And Sarah Snook as a hard charging lawyer is a pleasure as she always is; she’s also underused as, again, she seems to always be.
The film has some divisive elements I would imagine. The film kind of marks time by returning again and again to the visual of a bridge being built, tracking the slow progress of its construction as we track Martha’s journey through grief. For some, this will be more on the nose than they’d like. But, ultimately, there’s a bit of a twist near the end where the bridge ends up, at least in my opinion, symbolizing something a little different than I was expecting. It isn’t, after all, a metaphor for Martha rebuilding a connection to her family or to her life; it’s something else, but then that’s only my opinion. And the final scene will also feel a bit like gilding the lily for some people. It’s a case where the movie has a scene that really implies a lot and gave me, at least, the emotional closure I was looking for without being explicit about anything . . . and then it has a scene where it kind of makes all of that explicit. So, that final scene certainly wasn’t something I wanted or needed, but neither did it bother me. And I can understand the desire of the filmmakers to underline their message here which is, end of the day, a message of hope, a message that a person can survive this kind of trauma and grief and emerge on the other side, not necessarily a better or wiser person, but just a person that chooses to live. That’s the kind of message that, after a movie as raw and painful as this one, the filmmakers probably won’t to be absolutely sure comes across. Saying that about the tone of the ending might be kind of a spoiler, but I feel like saying it because I think there are people who will be more apt to give the movie a try if they know that it, at least, doesn’t have a soul-crushing ending. It’s a brutal, hard to watch, often extremely painful journey to get there, but the ending allows us to feel that healing has begun. And that would be a good thing because this a movie that should be seen and experienced. That astounding one take scene at the beginning is reason enough all by itself; likewise, Kirby’s performance, even if the movie was not as well written as it is, would be worth seeing the movie for all by itself. But those aren’t the only reasons. It’s a masterful piece of work top to bottom really, not an easy watch, but a deeply rewarding one. 4 stars.
tl;dr – Vanessa Kirby leads this harrowing exploration of grief with a powerful, magnificent performance; a gripping, hard-to-watch, but ultimately rewarding masterpiece. 4 stars.