loss lingers in the air, a stale perfume swirling in the listless spring afternoon, suffusing into life like a drop of paint in a bowl of tepid water, distilling into every conversation, seasoning every meal, so familiar and normal that it’s become bland, and it’s forgotten until it isn’t, surfacing as a dull ache, a bitter remark, a maddening hallucination, and we escape into pop ballads about love everlasting, and we keep walking
I miss my grandmas
“it has everything to do with you.”
“feelings can creep up just like that.
I thought I was in control...”
love, drifting like cigarette smoke through streams of light, unannounced, uncontrolled, seeping into pained souls passing one another in narrow corridors. love, aching next to sorrow in hearts unprepared, unwilling perhaps, as rain pours down.
an inimitable, slow-burning masterpiece. the layered, prismatic shot composition, poignantly subtle performances, and elegantly hushed soundtrack, swirl together, forming a sculpture of injured passion bubbling over; a still-life in languid motion.
an immaculate gut-punch to my hopeless (or hopeful, rather) romanticism, but I love love, even reticent, unrequited love, and I don’t care what it does to me.
quiet devastation at the hands of a metaphor. a mystery drifts in on a warm breeze from Africa, rustling the leaves as sunset slowly burns the day to ashen black. Miles Davis dances with North Korean propaganda in the cool twilight.
poetic, existentialist ambiguity gives way to bracing tension with the gradual sublety of light creeping into the morning. Mowg’s score bestows a soft menace on everything. a beguiling swell of cloistered emotional heft, and what a rousing coda! my heart aches for the greenhouse: hopeful, promising, ephemeral, lost in a puff of smoke.
“A24 could put out a necrophilia-tinged island romance where a farting Harry Potter corpse with super powers plays second fiddle to a mentally unraveling Paul Dano, color it as a requiem for missed opportunities and an ode to queer thought, and you know I’d still slurp that shit right up I tell you what.”
— somebody, at some point, probably
it works. you won’t believe it till you see it, but it works. a strange, risky, surprisingly touching debut. the Daniels have my attention now.
“if you don’t know Jurassic Park,
you don’t know shit.”
