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KNIVES AND SKIN
Director: Jennifer Reeder Cast: Grace Smith, Marika Engelhardt, Ireon Roach, Kayla Carter, Tim Hopper, Kate Arrington, Audrey Francis, James Vincent Meredith, Ty Olwin, Raven Whitley, Jalen Gilbert, Emma Ladji, Robert T. Cunningham, Tony Fitzpatrick, Marilyn Dodds Frank MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:51 Release Date: 12/6/19 (limited); 12/13/19 (wider) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 12, 2019 A movie as strange as this one needs some grounding in reality. Knives and Skin gives us some—but not nearly enough. In terms of a plot, the movie is about the search for a missing teenage girl. In terms of theme, it's about the crushing feelings of hopelessness and loneliness of small-town living, where kids assume there's no escape, because they're teenagers and they see their parents still feeling that way. In the opening scene, Carolyn (Raven Whitley), who apparently possesses some magical powers (Don't ask, because the movie never explains or follows through with the concept), is left bleeding on a riverbank by a jerk of a guy named Andy (Ty Olwin). The rest of the movie follows the girl's classmates and their parents as they try to figure out what happened to her. Key among them are Joanna (Grace Smith), who sells used underwear for money and becomes the target of a lustful substitute teacher (played by Alex Moss), and Carolyn's mother Lisa (Marika Engelhardt), who can smell her daughter in Andy's car and on him. Others—more classmates and parents (Much time is spent on an extramarital affair)—appear throughout the story, constantly interrupting any kind of narrative flow and existing solely to re-affirm how miserable existence in this place is. Writer/director Jennifer Reeder's approach to this story is a messy mixture of weirdness and sappiness. Characters speak and behave in ways that don't make sense, and the feeling is that Reeder simply wants to turn suburban life into an almost-but-not-quite realm of the surreal. Occasionally, the thick veneer of the movie's absurd elements cracks. Instead of finding the humanity beneath (A very late scene with Lisa at least acknowledges the gravity of what has happened), the filmmaker gives us the characters—including, in the movie's most frustrating moment, a rotting corpse, which moves because of magic—singing some recognizable songs in a minor key. To Reeder's credit, it takes significant courage to make a movie this thoroughly odd, this legitimately inscrutable, this meticulously paced, and this stylistically idiosyncratic. Knives and Skin, though, sacrifices much of its meaning (except when characters explicitly state it) and its potential for a string of oddities. The only connective tissue between them is a plot that barely matters and a hollow, one-note atmosphere of gloom. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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