Dir: Benedict Andrews | Writer: David Harrower | Cast: Ben Mendelsohn, Rooney Mara, Ruby Stokes | 91′
The intensity between Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn make this disturbing drama a compellingly haunting if ultimately rather unsatisfying experience. Adapted for the screen by David Harrower from his 2005 play Blackbird, the film has a strange, fractured structure that flips back and forth losing much of its dramatic heft in the process. Mara is Una a young woman who was seduced by Ray (Mendelsohn) a middle-aged father and neighbour when she was only 13. This may have worked for Una, had he not then left her, and this sexual abandonment lies at the core of her need to track him down and resolve the emotional conflict that has obsessed her for the previous 15 years. Meanwhile Ray has a good job in retail, and has changed his name. The two-hander plays out in Ray’s workplace, like the chamber piece of its origin, with occasional forays into the outdoors. There’s a strange feeling of alienation heightened by Thimios Bakatakis’ cool interior visuals, placing the central characters in semi-lit separate frames, with Jed Kurzel’s eerie occasional score, unmistakably echoing his work on Snowtown and The Babadook. Ruby Stokes plays the young Una, in a confusing way – with Mara’s voiceover – that initially makes us mistake her for Ray’s real daughter. Harrower’s clammy claustrophobic treatment makes for an unsettling denouement to this sorry, but all too familiar tale of rejection, sexual frustration and unrequited lust. MT
NOW OUT ON BLURAY | 8 JANUARY 2017