Mark Reviews Movies: TAHARA

Tahara, Film Movement

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 9, 2022

Someone their age has died. It makes Carrie (Madeline Grey DeFreece) reconsider what matters the most, what she wants from life, and how she has lived. It gives her best friend Hannah (Rachel Sennott) a lot about which to joke and gossip, as well as a manipulative plan for how she can finally hook up with a certain boy. There are mismatched pairs, and then, there's the friendship at the heart of Tahara.

That bond slowly, awkwardly, and painfully collapses over the course of director Olivia Peace's finely, incisively observed debut feature, written by Jess Zeidman. The story takes place during and after a funeral service for a teenage girl, who was in the same Hebrew school as the protagonists and died by suicide. At first, this means little to Carrie and Hannah, because they weren't really friends with the girl. Indeed, no one at the school really was, because she was quiet and didn't fit in with anyone.

Zeidman's screenplay reveals why as Carrie, Hannah, and their classmates immediately attend grief counseling, run by Moreh Klein (Bernadette Quigley), following the funeral at their synagogue. Some of it comes from rumors that the dead girl was dating Tristan (Daniel Taveras), the boy on whom Hannah has a crush, and his denial of that. Some of it comes from jokes that the girl would have liked knowing that her body would be bathed only by women in the eponymous cleansing rite.

Most of it, eventually, comes from Hannah, who has told everyone that the girl asked her out at a party. Well, she told almost everyone—except for Carrie. This becomes an issue for an assortment of reasons, but it's mostly because Hannah asks Carrie to kiss her in the bathroom—in order for Hannah to make sure she's a good kisser.

When Carrie obliges, the screen, set in a claustrophobic 1:1 aspect ratio, expands. Meanwhile, the girls transform into clay figures whose faces melt together, and it's obvious that whatever relationship has existed between the two—the depth of which is cleverly displayed in how they can communicate perfectly through gestures and facial expressions—has become something else in Carrie's mind.

DeFreece's performance is keenly attuned to the ways Carrie becomes almost reflexive in her emotional vulnerability after that moment, and Sennott has the tricky task of making it equally likely that Hannah could be only, if wholly, self-involved or that she knows exactly how her best friend feels about her. Either way, it's not an ideal quality in a friend, to say the least, but one of those options suggests a level of cruelty, which might explain why Hannah is so defensive when the topic of the dead girl asking her out arises.

Those two performances are key to the film's success. There's also, though, real skill, from both the director and the screenwriter, in how Tahara goes from being uncomfortably funny to becoming simply and increasingly uncomfortable.

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