Grade: A
Verdict: Trey Edwards Shults feature debut is an engrossing and expertly crafted whirlwind of movement, sound and pain, offering an unwavering look into a distressed psyche.
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It only took five minutes for “Krisha” to knock the breath out of me. This chaotic and unrelenting film is best enjoyed in a dark room with the door locked to ensure maximum absorption in this frantic and empathetic catastrophe.
It’s a stressful watch and a worthy one, the whole feature vibrates along with its titular character. Sixty-something Krisha (Krisha Fairchild) comes home on Thanksgiving after “time away” to “heal herself,” though we can’t be sure what exactly that entails. She’s welcomed at first, but quickly the house gets chilly as her presence unearths old feelings, whose origins seem connected to her beloved lock box full of pills.
Director (and writer, editor, actor) Trey Edward Shults filmed the movie over nine days in his mother’s Texas home, and the cast is heavy with family. Krisha Fairchild is Shults’ aunt and one of the only experienced actors in the group. Shults’ non-actor mother Robyn Fairchild also plays a crucial role as Krisha’s long maltreated sister, and relatives fill just about every other role. The performances are stellar, probably in part because of the family’s connection to Shults’ father and cousin, who inspired the film.
Krisha’s interactions with her family vary from tentative acceptance to downright viscousness. There’s a lot of pain here and Shults navigates a complex web of personal affronts. He lets relationships reveal themselves to us through small moments, and doesn’t over explain how everyone functions. His light touch– astonishing for a 27-year-old debuting his first film– lends to the film’s tight realism. Nothing feels written in.
One might dispute calling the film’s style realistic (“There’s not even any handheld shots,” you may contest) but consider whose eyes we’re looking through. We don’t just follow Krisha, we see everything, even her drug- and stress-addled point of view, and that’s where all the formal insanity comes in. DP Drew Daniels’ camera forces us into her worldview with incessant dipping and swirling and uncomfortable angles.
The score is equally trippy, a dreadful crescendo that pushes home the film’s quasi-horror sensibility and turns simple conversations into moments of violence. Shults furthers this by intercutting conversations with images of sweaty twenty-somethings arm wrestling and dogs nipping each other in the yard, a reminder that there’s conflict simmering under every interaction. It’s disturbing and physically unsettling.
Thankfully, Krisha herself is treated with care, sympathetic from the get go. The visceral horror rarely lets up, but presenting the film from her perspective keeps her pain in focus, raising her from “unreliable heartbreaker” to broken human being.
It’s crushing when things go bad, and Shults doesn’t try to force a happy ending; he knows this story too well. But “Krisha”’s staggering empathy makes it worth all the trauma to experience this woman’s world so fully.
