Mark Reviews Movies: BRAID

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 31, 2019

Three childhood friends reunite to play a twisted, depraved game in Braid. It's the debut feature of writer/director Mitzi Peirone, who displays a clear flair for the macabre, while also showing off a chameleonic visual sense (with the aid of cinematographer Todd Banhazl) and a deep investment in the psychology of her characters.

The downside to these qualities is that the story of the film makes little sense, especially when the seemingly final climax turns into an elliptical epilogue. By that point, though, Peirone has crafted such a nightmarish vision of co-dependent imagination among her trio of protagonists that, if we actually knew for certain what the hell is happening here, it might be more disappointing.

The plot involves Petula (Imogen Waterhouse) and Tilda (Sarah Hay), two actresses whose lives have fallen into poverty, despair, and desperation. At the start, they're involved in drugs and owe money to an unseen supplier, after losing their stash while running from the cops. The women's solution is to pay a visit to their old friend Daphne (Madeline Brewer), the wealthy inheritor of her family's lavish estate house in the country, and rob her safe.

The twist is that Daphne is insane. When they were children, the three played a game of doctor with tragic results, and now, alone in a dilapidated mansion, Daphne seems stuck in that fantasy mindset. Petula and Tilda play along, with the latter showing up at the house as Daphne's "daughter" and the former arriving as the town "doctor," hoping they'll find the safe and the means of opening it. Daphne's way of playing this game has escalated, though, and her friends find themselves tortured, drugged, and otherwise tormented over the course of their stay.

Through it all, Peirone toys with reality in obvious ways—the psychedelic warping of colors, the anachronistic appearance of a police detective (played by Scott Cohen), the seemingly miraculous healing of various injuries—and with time in more subtle ways, which don't become apparent until the third act. The film is violent on occasion, but the real horror here is the initial feeling of physical ensnarement and the mounting sense of psychological imprisonment.

Braid is a discomforting experience. In the film's claustrophobic atmosphere and its understanding of how entwined these women are, though, there are rewards in its genuinely horrifying, visually dexterous, and narratively ambiguous psychological examination.

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