A shady scalpel-for-hire takes Tye Sheridan’s grieving son on a nightmarish voyage in this hypnotic, maddening road movie
There’s a strange, stark bleakness to this intriguing and perplexing film from director and co-writer Rick Alverson. It is like a disturbing dream – and certainly anything featuring Jeff Goldblum, Udo Kier and Denis Lavant is sure to offer a strong range of flavours at the very least. There are fascinating visual compositions: weird rectilinear tableaux made from the forbidding lines of hospital corridors and lonely motel balconies. Cinematographer Lorenzo Hagerman gives us colours that are bleached out and subdued, as if approximating what people with severe depression see.
This is a film with an impressive, sometimes oppressive craft and technique – but it also feels unfinished. A sustained and rather brilliant conjuring of atmosphere, with some superb ambient music, finally succumbs to a rather banal inability to decide where to take the story and exactly how important the story has been. And it is disappointing that Goldblum’s tremendous and sometimes hilarious character disappears from the film, leaving us with the uncomfortable feeling that there was so much more to say about him. He is, in effect, replaced with a ridiculous, scenery-gobbling turn from Lavant, which crowds out the final section of the picture.
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