Take Shelter meets Frailty with a heaping helping of The Devils. It builds a nice atmosphere and I appreciate the quivering line between righteous religious zealot and schizophrenic mania. Quality, but I had hoped for more fervent terror and gripping dramatic tension. I found it too modest and I wanted to be pushed to the edge more because this doesn’t even really approach a precipice of audacity, depravity, or exhilaration. It’s a steady melancholic whisper of the finale of First Reformed, but I never felt a kinship enough to move me as I believe I was meant to do here.
I appreciate the unreliable narrator here as we are lost along with her in the “is this real” territory, more than the believer. It just never shook me as I wanted it to. Effective, yes. But not bone gripping.
Morfydd Clark is powerful. Her morose but ecstatic existence is portrayed so well with her stout demeanor and searching 1000 yard stare. But her devoted but detached cultish demeanor was hard to identify with.
It is a quality put together flick and horrific in its chilling psychopathic reality breaks, but it was not scary as I had hoped. The trapped terror of dark catholic femininity trapping her possible self-hood in a dark place of bloody sadness haunts but it lacks the frightful thump.
