"I could murder you right now and no-one would know anything about it," whispers Catherine to a random drunk guy she’s found passed out near her friend’s summer house. The line resonates through the movie, either as foreshadowing or a psychological red herring. A paradox of manic depression is that Catherine is at once emotionally fragile and terrifyingly strong-willed. She’s also acutely uncomfortable to be around, yet impossible to look away from.
This is spellbinding, awards-quality work from Elisabeth Moss.
Writer-director Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up Philip) crafts this haunting, affecting psycho-drama around spellbinding, awards-quality work from Elisabeth Moss as Catherine – with Katherine Waterston matching her subtlety in less-showy, no-less powerful support as the friend only Catherine is allowed to call Ginny. Moss’s scornful speech (which begins "You fucking animal, you unrepentant piece of shit...") to a quietly cruel interloper (Patrick Fugit) ought to become a much-quoted audition piece on a par with "coulda been a contender" and "Say hello to my leetle friend". Much of the film depends on long looks to camera and flickers of expression, while the backstory of a troubled friendship is filled in only partially.
This small, nuanced story evokes art film classics like Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and Robert Altman’s 3 Women with its story of two women who love and hate (and sometimes become) each other near water, but Perry also draws a lot on the mood, pacing, music and look of 1970s horror cinema. The calmly eerie house-by-the-lake setting exactly resembles the places where terrible things happen to women in Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, The Last House On The Left and I Spit On Your Grave, and a climactic party freak-out shifts into full-on terror with ghoul-like guests – making the point that a few wrong words can make being ordinarily miserable feel like being trapped in a nightmare movie.