Love of Your Life

The raw, almost feral energy that Margaret Qualley can bring to her best roles often exists in fascinating tension with the serenity of her wide-eyed beauty. Sadly, we get little more than the wide-eyed beauty in the generically titled, postcard-pretty romantic weepie The Love of Your Life. Rachel Morrison, who directed the boxing drama The Fire Inside (2024) after her stunning and vital cinematography on Fruitvale Station (2013), Mudbound (2017), and Black Panther (2018), has created a movie where surface beauty disguises a lack of genuine emotional depth.

Qualley plays Maya, a hospital nurse, whom we first see arriving at work in crisp, bright blue scrubs, which appear to be fresh out of a Halloween costume bag. There is a dissonance throughout the film in her performance as a healthcare professional. Maya gives great eye contact, but somehow it always feels like a simulacrum of actual connection: there is something about her character — and the performance — that feels completely self-absorbed.

In fairness, Maya’s self-absorption is the film’s subject. After her perfunctory meet-cute with the unusually buff academic Charlie, the film races through their dewily sweet courtship and marriage. All is bliss, aside from Charlie’s asthma attack the first time the couple has sex; we soon realize that this is a key bit of foreshadowing for the tragedy that hits early in the Covid pandemic. Plunged into sorrow, and guilt that she may have brought the virus home from work, Maya upends her life, ghosting the people close to her to move to Europe, where she supports herself with telehealth work while wallowing in the solace of drinking and one-night stands. That is, until she meets the impossibly handsome, thoughtful, and vulnerable Felix (Aaron Pierre). 

The key men in Maya’s life — Charlie, Felix, and childhood friend and brief ex-flame Jason (Patrick Schwarzenegger) — are all distractingly handsome, a bit too picture-perfect, which is emblematic of the film’s key problem. As Maya’s journey takes her from Portugal to London, every setting looks like something out of a travel brochure, replete with bodies of water bathed in the golden glow of magic hour. When Maya meets Charlie’s family, they just happen to live in a rustic, isolated oceanfront house, tailor-made for the inevitable sunset vista. Beyond all the shots by bridges and rivers, the water obsession is also taken indoors, where Maya broods in tastefully photographed shower or bath scenes. 

The film is indeed lovingly crafted, and Qualley is magnetic enough that it will go down easily when the movie lands on Prime Video. As for emotional substance, it does boast one genuine treasure: a deeply moving, complex, lived-in performance by Catherine Keener as Charlie’s mother. In a relatively small role, she radiates the journey through love, pain, wisdom, anger, and forgiveness that the entire movie is supposed to be taking us through. One of the most substantial moments in an otherwise shallow film comes through a focus on sound rather than image; when we are asked to look at a cityscape and focus not on what we see, but on the richness of all the background noises that we hear. It’s one of the few times that The Love of Your Life actually heightens our perception rather than merely sugar-coats it. — DAVID SCHWARTZ

Drifter

Here’s the thing about competitive drift racing: it has very little to do with who crosses a finish line first. Instead, it’s a pastime focused on execution, the precise control of the car as it accelerates and decelerates, and the fine calibration of momentum. In that sense, Drifter has taken plenty of inspiration from the sport it depicts. Unfortunately, the film’s momentum hasn’t been as finely calibrated. Clearly a labor of love, it nonetheless falls into repetition and cliché even as it more successfully indulges in the languid beauty of the car in motion.

Sung Kang (also directing here) is Tree, who spends his days cleaning up at an autoshop/racetrack in dust-ridden Barstow, California. In his off hours, though, he drifts, wrapping his gorgeous (but slightly banged-up) vintage crimson red Toyota Corolla AE86 around the loops of a deserted obstacle course. Blind in one eye and beset with PTSD from a traumatic childhood, Tree has no real relationships to speak of beyond a loose circle of losers who also populate the track. But when a simple twist of fate offers Tree the opportunity to compete in a professional drift competition, he snatches the chance, though he doesn’t yet understand that he’ll have to open up to help, both technical and emotional.

Drifter is an obvious passion project for Kang. An outstanding supporting actor who propped up some of the best of the Fast and Furious films (in which he is a fan favorite), he never got his due as an action star or leading man. That’s too bad, because he can deadpan with the best of them while still feeling like there’s a reservoir of feeling that exists deep down. As a performer, he serves his film well here, making Tree’s stoicism always feel natural, soulful. And he’s populated the film with an appealing group of friends from his acting school days, like Tamara Braun’s Rosie, who takes a liking to Tree, and Gregory Cruz as a drug dealer, though his thread offers a rather unnecessary crime subplot that simply bloats out the film.

Speaking of, let’s talk about the runtime, which lands at an astonishing 147 minutes. In fairness, the best parts of Drifter are spent watching Tree in his beautiful car as it coasts through loops and sails around the track, sequences that are superbly shot and loaded with arresting images, especially for aficionados — you could watch hours of it. But the melodrama that takes up the space in between racing sequences is unfortunately merely rote. And in such large portions, too! There are at least three scenes where Tree dances with Rosie at Golden Hour, as well as endless chatter with racing mentor Bennett (Michael Nehring), who does the standard gruff old-timer routine while battling through tears to talk about his dead-too-young daughter. Kang’s intent here is sturdy: build a community of down-and-outs and have them rally around a beacon of hope (in this way, Drifter is eerily reminiscent of Shûji Terayama’s 1971 film Boxer). This all works great on paper, but in practice it simply drones on and on, doling out monologues and repeating character beats ad nauseam. Much like the sport itself, stripping out what doesn’t matter and focusing on execution should have been the goal. At a leaner 90 minutes, Drifter would have been an outstanding, idiosyncratic sports drama. Viewers will need to decide if the extra hour of bland emotionalism is worth the effort. — MATT LYNCH

Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney

Is it possible for an entire nation to have an inside joke? Manitoba-based filmmaker Matthew Rankin’s brilliant new film Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney goes even further, zeroing in on the slow, gradual, and yet somehow preternaturally ordained rise of Brian Mulroney, the Prime Minister who led his party, the Progressive Conservatives, out of a decades-long electoral wilderness, setting the stage for Canada to at long last dispense with the postwar Keynesian economic consensus and join Reagan and Thatcher in selling off the welfare state to the highest bidder.

A political outsider and businessman (sound familiar?), Mulroney was, in the words of one commentator, “the jaw that walks like a man,” a camera-ready empty suit who positioned himself as a common-sense everyman. He never tired of referring to his humble beginnings in Baie-Comeau, QC, the son of a factory worker and himself no stranger to hard work. An Irishman, Mulroney was able to triangulate French-Canadian resentment against the British-Protestant Anglophones, and as Rankin shows in great detail, he used just a bit of charisma to outflank his Tory rivals, most notably party leader/short-term PM Joe Clark, repeatedly referred to in the film as Joe Who?

Rankin has been known to go elbows-up and balls-deep into Canadian cultural and political lore. His film The Twentieth Century dramatized the rise of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, who rose through the ranks by completing uniquely Canadian feats of leadership, like ribbon-cutting and beaver annihilation. And his most recent feature, Universal Language, orchestrated a Kiarostami-esque tale of poetic realism in the snowy plazas of Winnipeg. (One immortal scene takes place in a Tim Hortons with all-Persian signage and a hot tea samovar.) But Mulroney most closely resembles Rankin’s early compilation featurette Kubasa in a Glass. That film was culled from thousands of hours of Winnipeg TV commercials and local cable access, and it demonstrated Rankin’s ability to plumb the depths of the mundane and come up with nothing less than the soul of a people.

Originally planned as a multi-episode TV program(me), Mulroney is broken into episodes. Reports from the film’s world premiere at TIFF’s Midnight Madness screening suggest that it works like gangbusters as a theatrical feature, provided Canadian spectators represent a critical mass. However, it may work even better on home viewing, which allows both neophytes and mere non-obsessives the opportunity to pause the movie and consult Wikipedia for necessary background. The writer of this review is an American but prides himself on extensive familiarity with Canadian cultural and political history. Nevertheless, certain references, such as the ‘80s kids show Edison Twins or the partisan leanings of Wayne Gretzky, required further exploration for the jokes to really land.

But the star of the show is Rankin’s format, which employs the audiovisual tropes of late ‘70s/early ‘80s media to bring the Mulroney story to life. VCR scan lines, cheesy graphics, Electric Company-style animations, and the overall texture of early cable news are mobilized as vehicles for a plethora of archival material, including TV coverage of Tory conventions and election night results, as well as an infamous (within Canada) debate between Mulroney (as Leader of the Opposition) and Liberal PM John Turner, wherein the challenger dismantled Turner on the question of self-dealing and cronyism, a patronage system that, after seemingly eons of Trudeau’s premiership, Canadians had had enough of. To tweak a popular meme, Mulroney became Prime Minister in that moment.

In addition to being a joy to watch – C-SPAN delivered like echt-era MTV – Mulroney is also a stunning rejoinder to the supposed inevitability of generative AI. This is precisely the kind of project that a lazier, less creative filmmaker would have plugged into the prompt machine. Instead, Rankin and his team — which includes effects wizard/Guy Maddin collaborator Galen Johnson — use 16mm and digital animation, matte effects, composite re-enactments, and hours upon hours of good old-fashioned archival research to produce a document of historical perspicacity and comedic achievement that recalls the glory days of SCTV. Do you have to be Canadian to love Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney? No… but it sure helps! — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Trees Are Watching

Some directors pick a lane and stay in it their entire careers. Some genre-hop, exploring different styles and methods, courting different audiences. So it’s of note when a filmmaker who has always adhered to the former mode decides to try their hand at the latter. Few would ever have expected Bahman Ghobadi, the exiled Iranian filmmaker known for his humanitarian dramas about people living through conflict and oppression, to suddenly swerve into the realm of horror cinema. Yet swerve he has with Trees Are Watching, a paranormal chiller about a woman who returns to her hometown to confront dark secrets from her childhood. And what comes from a sudden swerve? A car crash.

Darya (Eva Green, inexplicably cast as a Kurdish woman) is a writer on a trip — the same trip she makes every year, to the town in southern Turkey where she grew up. Along with her young, deaf daughter and her dog, she’s ostensibly there to gather material for a book. But the trauma of the childhood she’s either forgotten or denied — it’s never entirely clear — resurfaces in these old haunts. Something terrible happened here before Darya’s departure for London, aged nine — something that has seemingly dwelt in the town all these years, yet is apparently only making itself known upon this particular visit.

Alas, logic is far from Ghobadi’s primary concern in Trees Are Watching, though before asking why logic should factor into a story about supernatural matters, consider the extent of the suspension of disbelief the movie demands. In one scene, a door that has been locked from the outside (with no lock) becomes locked from the inside (with no attempt to open it). In another, a math teacher is shown teaching a classroom of students something clearly not math. Later, a detective examines the severed hand of a corpse in the police station’s office, and a member of the public is present. These may seem like inconsequential blips of the rational, but collectively they testify to what a nonsensical movie Ghobadi’s latest is, made worse by the fact that its pervasively somber tone makes no acknowledgment of the nonsense.

Indeed, the director treats the messiness and the absurdity with resolute seriousness, and he almost manages to pull it off at one point. Extended flashbacks to Darya’s youth, albeit in which she plays only a minor part, dial up the absurdity with the curious introduction of a monster that resides in toilet cisterns. This bizarre turn in the needlessly overdeveloped backstory shouldn’t work, yet with powerful performances, elegant compositions, and sharp editing, Trees Are Watching briefly becomes quite a compelling watch. One could dismissively chalk this up to Ghobadi’s relative comfort working in Turkish (the present-day scenes are mostly in English), but there’s a carefulness and a purpose to the craft in these scenes that’s a cut (or two) above the rest of the movie.

Elsewhere, it’s all tired tropes, poorly conceived and clumsily executed. Ghobadi favors jump scares, stormy weather, overbearing music, dim nighttime cinematography, and the wretched old crutch of implying, quite unsubtly, that his protagonist is off her meds, in order to generate atmosphere. As for the haunting, the premise is that the spirits of the dead become trees, so there are images of bleeding wood and a possessed chair that feel straight out of a Quentin Dupieux movie. In this way, despite being such a humorless work, Trees Are Watching is frequently, and never intentionally, very funny.

By the time you’ve seen Green clattered on the forehead by the leg of a flying chair for the fourth or fifth time, you’d think Trees Are Watching is fully out of ideas (what few it had in the first place). But it keeps going, tying up loose ends to threads you’d long forgotten. Ghobadi’s approach is haphazard throughout, with a pace that’s alternately jolting and lumbering, the latter particularly so in its wearying parade of would-be final scenes. It’s rare to see such a talented filmmaker so inept in execution, yet the cause of the catastrophe is clear. He has swerved far out of his lane, and in the process become horribly, horribly lost. — PADAÍ Ó MAOLCHALANN

Wild Wild East

Western movies come with certain promises: of adventure and lawlessness, of chiseled jaws and gun smoke, of riding into the sunset with the horizon for your taking. But a proper Western also sows its roots in destitution, in doomed shootouts and bloodied barroom floors. Such is the path of Jan Holoubek’s Wild Wild East, an atmospheric WWII mystery that builds its scaffolding at the intersection of John Ford and Fritz Lang. It’s a chilly, severe movie, one that wields the horrors of history as a cudgel toward its characters and audience alike.

It’s 1943, and Nazi Germany is in decline. The Nazi’s invasion of the Soviet Union is bleeding their Eastern power and resources, but the regime keeps enough faith to exert what influence it can — including one Martin Wolff (Itay Tiran), a Nazi clerk who descends on the snowy Polish borough of Zalesie Małe off a tip on hidden Jewish gold. Wolff is angular, blond, and severe, and he waltzes into town as if off the set of a Sergio Leone flick. Far from the world power of the USSR, Poland still buckles under German occupation, and Zalesie Małe has shuddered its doors and windows like a ravaged frontier town. The empty streets almost beg for a gunfight; if it weren’t so snowy, a tumbleweed might blow into frame.

Historical genre films lend themselves easily to bombast and hyperbole, but Wild Wild East is decidedly sober in its style, favoring the icy desolation of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to the antics of Tarantino. Holoubek coats Poland in the oppressive gray tartan of modern war films; the perpetual overcast bleeds into ash-coated snow to furl into a single, endlessly bleak canvas. When Wolff saunters into the remains of the town’s sole surviving hotel, you can almost feel the building’s stove failing to heat its drafty rooms.

Wolff enters the hotel in pursuit of a lawyer named Kowalski, the alleged keeper of the gold, who has (allegedly) long since fled. Instead, he’s met by Kaim (Robert Więckiewicz), the hotel’s mustachioed caretaker who shuffles through the hobbled Polish town like an ersatz Wyatt Earp. In Zalesie Małe, it seems that everyone has something to hide. Kaim guides Wolff through his compulsory searches as if on a wire, steering him past not only the rumored stashes of gold but also an illegally kept distillery, which he runs with his fellow townsfolk to sell under-the-table vodka to the occupying SS.

Among those ranks is Kurt Städtke (Jan Bülow), a Nazi captain who believes Wolff might be harboring secrets of his own. In one of Wild Wild East’s most efficient constructions of character, Städtke first approaches Wolff in a parted, boyish haircut and all-white joggers that recall the villains of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, slicing a pubescent menace that pervades the full Third Reich throughout the film. Städtke is both flamboyant and precise, a cat playing with its food before it strikes for the kill; the turn from his friendly façade toward Wolff is not a matter of if, but when.

As a genre exercise, Wild Wild East is a studied and polished Western but an even tighter noir. Each privately held secret — between Kaim and his fellow commoners, between Wolff and his fellow SS — stokes and inflames the other, until the entire Polish hamlet is locked into a standoff. As if things couldn’t get tenser, Holoubek introduces another player: a Ukrainian vigilante (Oleksandr Yatsentyuk), draped in furs that nod to Warren Beatty in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, who’s hot on the trail of gold himself and devoid of fidelity to any party but his homeland. The better half of Wild Wild East is refreshingly coy with its allegiances, allowing as much blood to fall on the hands of the oppressed as does the oppressors. It’s a fine and dense moral web that stands out in a crowded canon of war films.

[Spoilers ahead]

But within that moral web, the historic inhumanity of the Holocaust is conspicuously absent — that is, until Wolff’s secret is finally unearthed. A worker at Kaim’s hotel discovers Wolff’s picture in a magazine she shreds for kindling; before the war, he had been a prominent Jewish stage actor. The reveal sends Wolff’s house of cards tumbling and sets all of Zalesie Małe against him. Curiously, it’s also the first opportunity Holoubek takes to introduce the terrors that his rendering of the Nazis enact. Waiting until Wolff is unmasked to introduce the Holocaust is ostensibly an act of punishment, the end of the cognitive dissonance needed to betray one’s people. But it’s as much a rebuke toward Wild Wild East’s audience as it is toward Wolff. To fashion genocide as a narrative hair shirt is careless at best and reads closer to craven manipulation.

Wild Wild East isn’t the first WWII film to keep the Holocaust out of frame. The most recent example that comes to mind is Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a Martin Amis adaptation that follows the quotidian lives of the German bureaucracy as a people burns next door. That isn’t to say The Zone of Interest keeps genocide off-screen out of narrative convenience; its SS throw picnics under ashen skies, choke on the fumes of burning bodies, raise their voices at dinner over thundering rifles. It’s a calculated and cautious account of the suspension of humanity necessary to erase six million lives, one especially powerful amid an ongoing genocide in Palestine. A more careful hand may have been able to craft something similar with Wolff’s story. As it stands, Wild Wild East is happy to erase the goodwill earned through its admittedly successful genre exercises with an unwieldy, moralistic twist. — CHRISTIAN CRAIG

Still Night, Burning House

Carol Nguyen is a Canadian-Vietnamese filmmaker who has steadily climbed the ladder of the national industry since her prolific run of breakout short projects, in which she explored a diverse directorial vision during her years in high school and throughout her undergraduate studies. Capping off that stint of both familial documentaries and existential dramas/experimental projects, she directed and produced No Crying at the Dinner Table — a short that went on to vie for an Academy Award nomination and win a slew of awards and critical accolades, alongside establishing what has been an irrefutable path for East Asian-Canadian filmmakers, their confrontations with familial secrecy and traumas now so consistently referring back to that short for inspiration and technique. Carol, after a review of her CV, has had as robust a career in documentary cinema as an emerging filmmaker can have, working closely with major distributors and A-tier festival labs, and becoming a face others might aspire to. Her debut feature, Still Night, Burning House, in title and idea, creates a very pointed throughline across her filmography. No Crying at the Dinner Table is an obvious predecessor to this project, the feature acting less as an interrogation into the silence that permeates her home, à la No Crying, but instead her latest becomes an investigation into the emotional weight that her uncle’s suicide has left on the family. Looking a bit earlier into her filmography, the short This Home is Not Empty, an experimental project observing a diorama of a house going up in flames, presses in abstract but discerning methods the kind of volatility and estrangement that her cinema has taken itself to confront and excise, to its best ability: an ongoing interest that this debut does not stray from.

Where No Crying at the Dinner Table could very incisively enforce a therapy, which holds the collective stoicism of a partially agreed-upon silence on trial, Still Night, Burning House has a far more difficult task, unable to enact itself in the constrained, controlled spaces of the familiar, the safe, or the intimate — No Crying, as the title might suggest, takes place almost entirely in the family’s kitchen, indeed at their dinner table. Instead, Nguyen reaches across the globe, back to Vietnam, where the wishes and secrets of family reach beyond the known cloister where tragedy struck. Drawing this line is important because it’s fairly transparent where it seems this project cannot find the connective tissue to evoke a legible sentiment or observation on the intangible ways the death of Nguyen’s uncle has affected her family. There is grief, of course, and it is explicated, relitigated, brought out into the open, but the dynamics are too rigid, repetitive, and often aimless. It very much feels like an earnest moment to find the project’s thesis was not something that ever came out, was not something the filmmakers were lucky enough to stumble upon, and so instead had to cut around a gaping hole of emotional and structural coherence in order to conceive of the project at feature length. Nguyen has previously demonstrated her strength at grasping onto a moment of profundity and interrogating it with sympathy and compassion, but also firmness. Here, no such moment exists, and what that renders is a distancing effect.

Nguyen is never seen, only heard as narrator and interviewer, either to explain some cultural dissonances a Western audience might need or to push on certain themes her subjects are finding difficulty in articulating (though the latter happens only a small handful of times). Her lack of a presence is felt, because in the absence of any epiphanic realization or ruminative rationalization on the dynamics at hand — namely, with regard to Nguyen’s other uncle and her father, the brothers who hold the suicide closest to their heart with guilt and shame aching in the background — what is instead plain are the projections of her family’s traumas and the role they play in watching each subject maneuver how they must mediate these feelings and histories, without landing in a place of meaningful conclusion, or at least meaningful reflection. In so many ways, then, this becomes Nguyen’s least inquisitive project, the tumult of her family made transparent as object and never really considered in a reflexive light. In truth, Reflexivity has not yet been a part of the director’s thematic rolodex, and Still Night, Burning House begs the question of why, as the gap left in the wake of a 70-minute feature, pushed out of mid-length territory via an extensive use of languishing and under-instrumentalized B-roll, troubles the role cinema has in partaking in this family’s journey. Could all of this have happened in the exact same way without the mediation of cinema? Many will undoubtedly appreciate the film and the subjects for their willingness to be vulnerable, to open up for the public a discourse viewers might bring home, and that can certainly be appreciated. But there is still the fundamental question of translating this intimate, shared sadness to the space of theaters and audiences in formal and structural terms that remains here unconvincingly answered.

. — ZACHARY GOLDKIND

The Fortunate Isles

Helena Girón and Samuel Delgado’s The Fortunate Isles begins with images of gently undulating water accompanied by a brief text providing historical context for their story: “In the 15th century, the eastern Canary Islands were conquered by Norman navigators in the service of the Crown of Castile. After devastating the indigenous population, the settlers brought slaves from the nearby coasts of Africa as well as people from Castile, who believed they were heading towards prosperous lands.” A slow, somber montage of landscape shots quickly follows, immediately dispelling any notions of potential prosperity. This is a dry, desolate terrain, with beaches of stone and dark silt and stalks of wispy, yellowed grass. Small, single-room shacks are jammed into crevices, people’s meager belongings covered in dust. Onto this desolate land enters Fátima (Luisa Ahl Laabiad), a young, very pregnant woman who is the property of the decrepit Gaspar (Lou Castel), a blind, alcoholic Marquise who owns this small chunk of mostly useless island.

Continuing with the formal and political concerns of their first feature-length film, 2021’s They Carried Death, Girón and Delgado eschew traditional narrative exposition in favor of a stripped-down, elliptical series of vignettes; what follows is a brief but potent exploration of a colonized land destroying the poor souls dragged there against their will. Gaspar controls the only water well on the island, which he has Fátima parcel out to the other denizens (it’s unclear if they too are slaves or serfs, although their dire circumstances remain the same regardless). They are all dirty and unkempt, imploring her for more water and food, but she refuses. Gaspar fears that if they take too much, then the well will run dry; and besides, he has no real interest in the well-being of these people. A man ferries goods to the island, but when Fátima asks him to bring water and food, he replies that the Marquise requests only wine. We see the people trying to fish, mending nets, and praying for rain, while Gaspar lounges in a chair and demands Fátima describe what he cannot see. The novelty of a mirror washing up on shore provides a brief moment of intrigue during an otherwise monotonous routine, but of course Gaspar quickly claims it to hang on his own wall. He’s almost entirely an invalid, but has the serene countenance of a despicable man who is sure of his place in the world, and even as Fátima bathes and cleans him, Gaspar is quick to correct her French and chuckle at her halting, stumbling accent. He’s a stubborn fool, in other words, and is involved in a long-standing feud with his adult son who owns the land across the channel (played by one-time Claire Denis regular Grégoire Colin). Unsurprisingly, it is Gaspar’s stubbornness that will ultimately doom him and his people. 

The Fortunate Isles can’t help but bring to mind Rossellini’s Stromboli and Costa’s Casa de Lava. Like those films, The Fortunate Isles takes a heavily symbolic central idea — the well of colonialism has dried up as the land rejects the occupier — and renders it in firm, physical ways. The landscape is both a hard, material reality and a psychological space, existing as an uncaring, unblinking witness to the human drama playing out upon it. The filmmakers convey a lot with very little; at barely 80 minutes long, The Fortunate Isles is compact but heavy with ideas. Much of the film is shot in medium close-up, except for when characters are juxtaposed against the landscape, emphasizing their smallness. Interiors are cramped and claustrophobic, but the vastness of the outdoors represents only another kind of imprisonment. The marquise does eventually die, and it’s here that the film complicates its scenario. The villagers plunder the well and devour the marquis’ chicken coup, but once their revelries have ended, they find that the well has indeed run dry. For her part, Fátima presents a complicated case; despite the branded scar on her face, she is cleaner and more put together than the others, and it’s strongly suggested that she might have enjoyed her station above the other villagers. She is, of course, deeply concerned about the well-being of her unborn child, and guards a secret supply of water even when others demand help for their own newborn baby. It’s a complicated moral quandary, one which the filmmakers refuse to shy away from. Fátima is a victim, certainly, but also perpetuates some of the same behaviors as her colonial oppressors. A long sequence of desperate people drinking seawater is deeply disturbing, and while some of the men take a boat out to catch up to a distant storm to collect rainwater, it’s just as likely that they will face death. It all builds to a stunning conclusion, one which could be read as a genuine miracle or simply as a cruel vicissitude of fate. What’s certain is that colonial violence renders its victims helpless against either.

. — DANIEL GORMAN