A fine film noir set in the hopeless New Mexico desert. Until now I had been indifferent to negative on Kristen Stewart's acting, but she has won me over. Maybe hard-boiled mysteries and thrillers suit her? She could play Humphrey Bogart roles the rest of her career and I'd be satisfied. Katy O'Brian is excellent as the drifter with a heart of gold, like, award-worthy. Anna Baryshnikov adds a lot of value in a thankless role. Speaking of thankless, Dave Franco took the worst role, the abusive husband, and made something of it. Someone's gotta play the baddie! And Ed Harris, oh I missed you!
SEX: This is what they used to call in the 1980s and 90s an Erotic Thriller. There's some intense lesbian sex in this movie, and one hetero hookup in the front seat of a car.
DRUGS: Beyond just being a classic thriller/film noir, there's a strong surreal streak running through the movie, including some very intense nightmarish hallucinations. One of them was very hard to watch.
VIOLENCE: Also, be warned: the murder and the resultant corpse at the center of the story is as graphic and disgusting a murder as I've seen outside a horror movie in a long time. It's shocking, and to her credit, Stewart's character reacted as strongly as I would have.
The director goes out of her way to show that the movie takes place during the falling of the Berlin Wall in 1991, but I'm not sure why? Why show the wall falling on television? Is there some symbolism I'm missing? It's convenient for storytelling purposes to set the movie in the pre-cell phone, pre-Internet era, but I hadn't been thinking about cell phones and the Internet until it was forcibly pointed out to me.
If you have a taste for claustrophobic thrillers, and stomach for violence, weird drug hallucinations, and two women going at it with each other, check it out. Great Barrington Triplex