After arriving at work drunk and avoiding death at the hands of a man she fired, a woman tries to find a way out ...
Real interesting psychic journey down the river of alcohol abuse. Or is it? I'm not being clever, because this movie, for all its flaws, uses a lot of skill in generating a truthful mystery behind the vague reality.
It starts with an ordinary portrait of the alcoholic, which is then blown wide open by a violent event, leading to the heroine's attempt to escape her horrible situation. She fetches up in a boarding house, where events turn weird, and every attempted escape from there ends in her getting drawn back in.
That's the set up, and it's done with varying quality. Early on the cinematography ain't up to much, with crude framing, poorly handled focus (sometimes experimental), and unimaginative lighting. Yet there's one beautiful shot of the heroine's terrified face on the pillow, with her eyes in shadow; and an interesting reverse-angle cut through a wine rack that creates the effect of the heroine taking fright at both the opportunity for alcohol and the sight of herself, which plays into the repeated mirror motif - kudos to the editor.
The music and sound effects are a bit obvious. The direction too is clunky in parts, in need of more thought at the storyboard stage, and relies on effects that are too explicit early on. But it settles in for the ride, and there are many imaginative touches that fill out the heroine's bizarre world, such as the wine bottle tags and the guest register.
I think the story finds its feet when the third character is introduced, with an excellent performance that provides a stable frame. The lead actress goes through a good range of drunken behaviour, from self-confident assertion in front of the mirror to haunted anxiety the next morning - although Emily Blunt still takes the Oscar for that kind of performance. The actress playing the proprietor is perfunctory in a limited part.
The climax is fascinating, as the heroine begins to make sense of her situation, sorting photos on the bathroom wall, even as the threat closes in on her. I think the screenwriter must have learned a lot from David Lynch in how to present psychic events as regular narrative. So the notion of the hotel as rehab becomes more explicit, yet it seems just as much a trap as the heroine's own personal gin palace in her bottle strewn bedroom. And is alcohol the real problem, or an escape from something deeper?
The final reckoning does wrap it up entirely, but for me it ducks the psychological truth by insisting that the vague reality, with all those violent deaths, was literal fact rather than a stand in for forces struggling within the heroine. Instead of coming to terms with herself, she says an act of contrition and submits to something external, which has unwelcome connotations of the God of Alcoholics Anonymous. If you watch Mulholland Dr carefully - which I guess was a big influence here - you find that nobody dies, and the strange story maps on to a tragic but ordinary life.
Overall: Real interesting, probably a rewatcher.
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