SLIFF 2013: 9 Full Moons

2013 // USA // Tomer Almagor // November 22, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theatre)

[Full Disclosure: 9 Full Moons was one of five debut feature films in the juried New Filmmaker’s Forum competition at the 2013 St. Louis International Film Festival. I served on the NFF jury, and spoke with director Tomer Almagor briefly at the SLIFF Closing Night Party. This review is intentionally biased to provide an affirmative, constructive evaluation of the film.]

Perhaps more than any other American city, Los Angeles has a distinctive mood. It’s a schizophrenic mingling of glamour and sleaze, promise and disillusionment, warmth and alienation. Numerous films have succeeded in capturing that aura, although in most cases the City of Angels also plays an essential role in the narrative (see: Sunset Blvd., Chinatown, Boyz n the Hood, L.A. Confidential, Mulholland Drive). A rarer subspecies of the L.A. film is one in which any city could have sufficed as a setting, but the distinctive Angelino vibe is so potently expressed, one can't imagine the film unfolding anywhere else (see: Double Indemnity, Short Cuts, Heat, Punch-Drunk Love, Drive).

Into this latter category one can place writer-director Tomer Almagor's debut feature, 9 Full Moons, a romantic tragedy that gets the peculiar L.A. mood exactly right. The film admittedly leans towards the desolate. 9 Full Moons is a story of simple dreams that are variously stalled, derailed, and crushed, usually as a result of plain old human fallibility. Although Almagor slides in the odd scene of sun-drenched contentment, the look of the film's nocturnal sequences leaves the strongest impression. It is a nightscape of desperation and discontent. There are dive bars dense with smoke and neon gloom, cold suppers waiting in shadowed kitchens, and midnight streets awash in sickly, sodium-yellow light.

It is a fitting setting for what is, at bottom, a straightforward tale of Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl. The fellow in question is the guileless, square-jawed Lev (Brett Roberts), an aspiring audio engineer who makes ends meet as a car service driver. One night he crosses paths with alluring wild girl Frankie (Amy Seimetz), and they eventually tumble into bed, where they exhibit an urgency and vulnerability that seems novel for both of them. What follows is an intense but erratic romance characterized by alternating periods of domestic bliss and explosive resentment. The conflicts that arise are mostly prosaic clashes of personality: Frankie is restless and hostile, while Lev is negligent and befuddled. However, Almagor—and Seimetz in particular—lend the story an anguished vividness that overcomes the banality inherent to relationship drama.

Who ultimately bears responsibility for Lev and Frankie's charred ruin of a relationship is a contentious question, but 9 Full Moons is not especially concerned with moralizing or laying blame. The tone of the film is one of sorrowful observation. Frankie is a profoundly wounded person: an abused self-harmer who yearns for the stability of a loving partner, but whose self-loathing compels her to drink and carouse with the creeps at the corner watering hole. Lev's fumbling attempts at emotional intimacy are sweet but often tone-deaf, and he becomes distant as professional opportunities begin demanding more of his time. Yet his most significant failing as a partner is his latently sexist assumption that all Frankie needs is a good man to save her, coupled with his narcissistic belief that he is the man to do it. Watching as happiness slips through these characters' fingers carries an ache that resonates with the film’s evocative depiction of L.A.

Where 9 Full Moons tends to stumble is in its performances and screenplay.  Roberts, bless his wavy romance novel locks, just isn’t acting at the same level as Seimetz, and this gap muffles the romantic chemistry and searing catharsis that the story demands. Roberts is adept at registering a kind of expectant uneasiness, which is fitting for Lev, but it doesn’t exactly make for electric leading man material. Almagor’s script, meanwhile, devotes an unnecessary amount of time to a subplot about washed-up country music star Charlie King Nash (Donal Logue), who draws Lev into his orbit. Logue’s presence is always a pleasure, and this narrative tangent does indeed have ripple effects on Lev and Frankie’s life together, but too often it feels like a distraction. The slender thematic echoes and counterpoints provided by Lev’s whirlwind relationship with Nash aren’t worth diverting attention away from the film’s primary plot. When 9 Full Moons is focused on the forlorn two-person saga of Lev and Frankie, it’s at its most affecting and intriguing.

SLIFF 2013: Farah Goes Bang

2013 // USA // Meera Menon // November 22, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theatre)

[Full Disclosure: Farah Goes Bang was one of five debut feature films in the juried New Filmmaker’s Forum competition at the 2013 St. Louis International Film Festival. I served on the NFF jury, and spoke with director Meera Menon briefly at the SLIFF Closing Night Party. This review is intentionally biased to provide an affirmative, constructive evaluation of the film.]

The conventions of the road movie and sex comedy are blended with dashes of multicultural wit and liberal politics in director Meera Menon’s sprightly debut feature, Farah Goes Bang. The eponymous Farah (Nikohl Boosheri) is a sunny but faintly shy Persian-American, who in the autumn of 2004 finds herself newly single and in a post-graduation slump. Her Type A Indian-American friend Roopa (Kiran Deol) has coerced her to leave California behind and stump for John Kerry in the purplish wilds of Ohio. Also along for this cross-country road trip is token white girl K.J. (Kandis Erickson), who shares her friends’ politics, but is a bit more of a prickly slacker at heart.

For Farah, this odyssey represents not only the opportunity to oust the despised George W. Bush from office, but a chance to finally lose her virginity. (There will be, presumably, an abundance of hot progressive guys in Ohio.) Her quest has little to do with love or relationships: it’s all about Farah getting past her sexual hang-ups so she can get on with the business of being an adult. Of course, declaring that her cherry will be popped by Election Night come hell or high water creates a lot of pressure. The situation is not helped by Roopa and K.J.’s good-natured teasing, or the expectations implicit in the economy size box of Trojans stashed in the back of the car.

The film’s screenplay, by Menon and Laura Goode, is fairly straightforward indie dramedy fare. Naturally, the women joke, quarrel, and reconcile along the way. Naturally, they cross paths with a diverse array of mostly one-dimensional characters, from the obligatory bigots to a sassy drag queen. Naturally—spoiler alert!—Farrah does indeed lose her virginity, and beneath a night sky blooming with fireworks, no less. The story is pleasant and fluffy without being syrupy, although there’s little to distinguish it from countless other Sundance-friendly tales about stalled twentysomethings and Middle American dysfunction.

That said, Menon and Goode enliven the proceedings a bit with odd twists and memorable moments. Some of these are deliciously crude, as in Farah’s attempt to preemptively break her hymen with a plastic toy gun in a gas station bathroom. Others are genuinely affecting, such as a scene where K.J. spontaneously opens up to a prospective voter while working the Kerry phone banks. (Menon rather cunningly presents this exchange so that only K.J.’s side of the conversation can be heard.)

The pall that hangs over the film, of course, is that the viewer knows exactly how the 2004 election ended: with four more calamitous years in the reign of C-Plus Augustus, to borrow Charles Pierce’s memorable title for the 43rd U.S. President. This is foreshadowed in the women’s awkwardly defensive pro-Kerry pitch, which is focused on correcting misinformation about their candidate’s war record. An old political adage seems applicable: when you’re spending your time fending off the other candidate’s attacks, you’re losing. In the disappointing aftermath of Election Night, the women concede that they were never that enthusiastic about John Kerry after all. This declaration has the whiff of sour grapes, but it’s also a broader admission that maybe the choices the women have made haven’t always been the wisest. Where Farah’s first taste of the dirty deed is concerned, however, there are no regrets.

SLIFF 2013: Michael Kohlhaas

2013 // France / Germany // Arnaud des Pallières // November 21, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Director Arnaud des Pallières’ bold, spellbinding new feature, Michael Kohlhaas, announces its strange sensibility in its first scene. In a long shot, a small team of horses trots along a rocky, windswept ridge beneath a strip of gloomy, overcast sky. The light is dim and gray-brown, and the animals are observed from a low angle, as though the viewer were at the foot of a steep hill. The men guiding the beasts press on against the whistling gale, laboring to keep their team moving forward. The forbidding and enormously potent mood conjured by this early scene persists throughout Pallières’ film. It is a bleak but complex aura, encompassing strands of cruelty, futility, exposure, and remoteness. It seems as though one is watching the film’s events from a distance, through the eyes of a primeval, cold-hearted deity. The effect is astonishingly powerful and unsettling.

Adapted from Heinrich von Kleist’s 19th-century novella of the same name—which was in turn inspired by historical events—Pallières’ film relates the tragic account of Michael Kohlhass (Mads Mikkelsen), an upright but strong-willed horse dealer in 16th-century France. (The book was previously adapted in 1969 by Volker Schlöndorff, who retained the source material’s German setting.) Kolhaas is taking his stock to market one day when he is stopped by agents of the local Baron (Swann Arlaud). Using a paperwork discrepancy as a pretext, the Baron’s men seize two of Kohlhaas’ finest animals as collateral. When the horses are later returned to Kohlhaas, they have been worked and abused almost to the point of death—and his protesting servant has been mangled by the Baron’s dogs for good measure.

The arbitrary viciousness of the Baron’s actions provokes Kohlhaas’ distinctly middle class sense of outrage. Unfortunately, the Baron’s political connections stymie Kohlhaas’ efforts to obtain a legal remedy for his grievances, which prompts his wife Judith (Delphine Chuillot) to travel to the court of the Princess (Roxane Duran) and plead her husband’s case. The Baron’s response to this move is dire and bloody, but rather than terrorizing Kohlhaas into silence, it only ignites the man’s righteous fury. Gathering together a small band of lowborn allies, he launches a pitiless guerrilla assault on the Baron’s keep. From there, Kohlhaas’ vengeance evolves into an uprising against the landed nobility, threatening the stability of the whole region.

The bare bones of Michael Kohlhaas' story—violent personal revenge mutates into a full-blown military campaign—have been featured in other films, but rarely, if ever, in such an unconventional manner. Pallières’ style is grim and unhurried, full of carefully chosen words and long pauses. The film watches as characters think, ruminating on their choices and their fates. It eschews music and fills the air with oppressive, unremitting sounds: shrieking winds, tolling bells, buzzing flies. It gazes out on the harsh Massif landscape of crags, valleys, and forests with a kind of Old Testament callousness. A glib description of the film might be “Braveheart as directed by Béla Tarr,” but Pallières has no taste for either Gibson’s testosterone-fueled action or Tarr’s figurative surrealism. Michael Kohlhaas is a remorselessly realistic and unromantic vision of the past: chilly, filthy, and brutal.

Pallières’ treatment of violence is emblematic of the film’s attitude. There are two major “action” scenes in Michael Kohlhaas, and neither is approached in an orthodox manner. Kohlhaas’ attack on the Baron’s stronghold is staged as a stealth thriller sequence, with crossbow-wielding partisans inching silently from one shadowy chamber and stairwell to the next, slaying anyone who resists their advance. In a later battle scene that pits Kohlhaas’ small mounted forces against those of a nobleman, the film regards the bloodshed from atop a nearby hill. In the distance, the combatants clash in near silence, with Kohlhaas’ fighters routing the enemy after a minute or two. These atypical depictions of warfare don’t exactly deglorify the violence on display—the first sequence in particular is still tense and gripping—but they do reveal that Michael Kohlhaas cannot properly be described as a War Movie, at least in the sense in which the label is traditionally used.

The film’s most pivotal moments occur not on the battlefield, but in urgent one-to-one conversations, usually where a character attempts to dissuade another from a particular course of action. It’s no accident that most of the film’s characters are identified only by generic, one word descriptors. A sympathetic Preacher (David Kross) serves as Kohlhaas’s conscience, the Governor (Bruno Ganz) as the voice of conservatism, and the Theologist (Denis Lavant) as an advocate for pacifism. Kohlhaas’ discussions with these characters tackle weighty matters, such as the morality of vengeance and the legitimacy of violent resistance. The talent of the performers and the strength of the screenplay by the director and Christelle Berthevas are such that these exchanges never feel stilted or didactic. The viewer is invited, through Kohlhaas’ experiences, to regard such issues with the soberness they deserve.

This is not to say that Michael Kohlhass is merely an arid thesis paper wrapped in 16th-century vermin and offal (although it is that to an extent). The ponderous but ruthless advancement of the story is essential to the film’s palpable air of doom. Much of that story is conveyed through protracted, exacting observation of characters: the small intimacies between a husband and wife, the restrained ritual of political negotiations, or the dread-choked formalities of a state execution. Elsewhere, Pallières illustrates events through moody, often wordless montage sequences. Kohlhaas’ merciless attack on a convent takes this form: nuns hasten through austere hallways, arrows are set aflame, an abbess prostrates herself, and the convent burns in the twilight. Through such means, the director evokes a sense of implacable cosmic retribution. God does not care whether a person is charitable, honorable, or humble: eventually, they will pay for their sins. The sole mote of light in Pallières’ film is Kohlhaas’ kind-hearted adolescent daughter Lisbeth (Mélusine Mayance), who the rebel rather amazingly succeeds in protecting from his enemies. In all likelihood, the malevolence of the world will someday stain even her virtue. However, the viewer—like Kohlhaas—does not know her fate after the curtain falls, and in uncertainty there is always a shimmer of hope.

SLIFF 2013: The Kill Team

2013 // USA // Dan Krauss // November 20, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

It’s been a strong year for advocacy documentaries, with Blackfish, Dirty Wars, The House I Live In, and Inequality for All making deft, passionate cases for political and social change.  Director Dan Krauss’ heart-rending new feature, The Kill Team, is another impressive entry in this subgenre, but it cuts to the quick in a way that surpasses its contemporaries. As with Blackfish, Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s galvanic exposé of Sea World’s cruelties, The Kill Team functions according to a “watch and promote” model. Although a second viewing would have little value, The Kill Team is the sort of eye-opening film that compels one to command friends, relatives, co-workers, acquaintances, and strangers on the street to “See. This. Film.” At risk of sounding speciesist, The Kill Team ultimately edges Blackfish due to its human subject matter. While keeping orcas in captivity is a barbarity, the perverse effects of war on the warrior’s psyche are a far more immediate and pervasive issue.

Proximally, The Kill Team concerns the Maywand District killings: the cold-blooded murder of Afghan civilians by a group of U.S. Army infantrymen in 2010. The only motive for these homicides appears to have been a bloodthirsty longing for the prestige associated with slain insurgents. When the soldiers became frustrated with the lack of opportunities for “legitimate” killings, they decided to start firing their rifles and tossing grenades at random farmers and clerics. Like corrupt cops closing ranks after a dirty shoot, the self-described Kill Team planted weapons and coordinated their stories to deflect suspicion. Not content with premeditated murder, some of the soldiers went so far as to collect grisly trophies of fingers, teeth, and other body parts from their victims.

Several soldiers were implicated in the slayings, but Krauss’ film focuses on Specialist Adam Winfield, a then 21-year-old kid from a Florida military family. While he was involved in the Kill Team’s appalling crimes, Winfield was the only soldier to react with substantial shock and disgust at the actions of fellow platoon members. After the first murder, Winfield quietly alerted his father Christopher to the situation via Facebook chat, expressing his disillusionment and horror, as well as his fear for his own life should his whistleblowing be exposed to the platoon. Winfield asked his father to report the incident to the Army and seek protection on his behalf. Where events went from there is best left for the viewer to discover, but suffice it to say that Winfield was thrown into a waking nightmare with his vicious Army “brothers” on one side and the service’s monolithic criminal justice bureaucracy on the other.

The Kill Team is plainly sympathetic to both Winfield’s plight and that of his anguished parents, who devote every ounce of energy and minute of time to the coordination of their son’s legal defense.  In one of the film’s most overwhelming scenes, his mother Emma begins explaining her views on her son’s case with a lawyer, and is soon pouring forth her maternal rage and woe. Meanwhile, Winfield sits nearby, focused on a laptop screen, rigorously keeping his eyes averted from his mother. (Whether this is from embarrassment or another reason is never entirely clear.) These kind of poignant moments abound in Krauss’ film, which uses talking head interviews, fly-on-the-wall observation, and footage from Afghanistan to construct a tale with deeper emotional, sociological, and philosophical ambitions than those of punchy news reports. While it necessarily recites the established facts of the Kill Team’s crimes, the film is particularly interested in how the soldiers’ savagery and the Army’s indifference exemplify larger institutional evils.

Krauss permits many of the Kill Team members to tell their stories in their own words, although the monstrous ringleader, Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs, is pointedly absent. These soldiers rarely evince the sort of remorse that their crimes would seem to warrant, but they all concede that their deeds are consistent with the mindset of the U.S. military rank-and-file, particularly the infantry. The bloodlust that Army training promotes in men in their late teens and early twenties—when such overgrown boys are at the peak of their aggressive tendencies—is a feature, not a bug. While the members of the Kill Team have an interest in shifting blame to organizational failures, their criticisms of Army culture sound less like attempts to minimize their responsibility, and more like the bitter wisdom of men whose unthinkable experiences have rendered them prematurely old. As The Kill Team makes clear, the actions of the platoon and the injustices done to Adam Winfield are likely to inspire outrage, but there are more urgent matters at play than those surrounding the specific events detailed in the film. As long as American troops are honored and socially rewarded for killing above all else, there will be an twisted incentive to murder, which means more dead civilians and more imprisoned soldiers.

SLIFF 2013: Children of the Night

2013 // USA // Angela Christian // November 19, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

If one were to judge documentary films strictly on the extent to which they fulfill their primary ambition, director Angela Christian’s Children of the Night would be a rousing success. The film profiles the small circle of passionate professionals who mold the raw imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope into gloriously vivid, high-resolution pictures for public consumption. It is a curious endeavor, demanding the skillsets of the astronomer, digital artist, educator, and public relations professional. Children does a fine job of exposing filmgoers to this thinly documented part of NASA's mission, stoking admiration for the uncommon blend of rigor and intuition that molds the public face of the Hubble program. The film also takes several intriguing detours into other aspects of astronomy education, most prominently into the creation of a textured Hubble picture book for the blind.

The tone of Children is shamelessly swooning, even ecstatic. Christian clearly regards the efforts of this unusual, highly specialized group of scientists as worthy of wider appreciation and understanding. The film flits restlessly between the depicted individuals, providing glimpses of not only their astronomical work, but also their lives beyond the Hubble program. Christian is continually striving to humanize and deepen the portraits it presents: the scientists in question are not just scientists, but ballroom dancers, nature photographers, and soccer coaches. The common worldview of the men and women profiled is one that values knowledge, aesthetics, and pure wonder. Children capably illustrates how this outlook is a perfect fit for the creation and dissemination of striking deep space images.

The film’s indifferent, amateurish cinematography and bargain basement production levels are not especially bothersome; a documentary feature can skate for an impressive distance on the compelling nature of its subject. The glaring flaw in Children—although not a fatal one—is that the film’s enthusiasm for that subject leads to wearying indulgence. At a running time of 109 minutes, it rolls on for an hour longer than is necessary, and as a result often slips into a repetitive, meandering mode. Often, the film revisits previous scenes for no particular reason, offering no new insight or information beyond the revelation that a bloody-minded editor is needed. The film’s use of music embodies the difficulty that Christian has in reigning in her instincts. Even for a post-rock aficionado like yours truly, Children is packed so densely with soaring singles by the likes of Sigur Rós, Mogwai, and Explosions in the Sky that the soundtrack borders on self-parody. That Children of the Night nonetheless manages to be an edifying experience has less to do with its characteristics as cinema than with the bottomless awe found in the astonishing images of galaxies, clusters, and nebulae.

SLIFF 2013: The House That Jack Built

2013 // USA // Henry Barrial // November 18, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

[Full Disclosure: I spoke briefly with director Henry Barrial both before and after the November 18, 2013 screening of The House That Jack Built at the St. Louis International Film Festival. The conversation was friendly, and generally positive about the film and his prior feature, Pig.]

There’s more than a little bit of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II in director Henry Barrial’s latest feature The House That Jack Built, and not merely because it concerns the intersection of family and crime in New York City. The House’s blend of slightly madcap family melodrama and gritty, street-level violence is virtually a tradition in American indie cinema, and certainly miles from the operatic tone of Francis Ford Coppola’s celebrated series. Yet The House is, in some ways, a complementary tale to The Godfather. Michael Corleone strives (and ultimately fails) to isolate his family from the violent malefactions of his Mafia empire, even as that business swells into a bloodstained, all-devouring behemoth. The protagonist of Barrial’s feature is similarly concerned with maintaining a sharp delineation between this illicit pursuits and his extended clan, but both Jack (Guiding Light star E. J. Bonilla) and the film around him are overwhelmingly focused on the family side of the equation.

For Caribbean-Latino Bronx native Jack, his modest business—commanding a cadre of streetcorner dope slingers, with a weary little bodega serving as his legitimate front—is but a means to an end. That goal is an unexpectedly warm-hearted one: to be the man who keeps his sprawling, chaotic family together and cared for in an apartment complex he owns. It’s a remarkably domestic, even conservative aim for a drug pusher. However, The House makes clear in its prelude and epilogue that Jack’s ideals have been informed by nostalgia for his childhood. In that gauzy era, motion and laughter were packed into his family’s flat as densely as the relatives. The House is therefore a film about a man with a sentimental vision for his life and the lives of his family members, and about how reality fails to conform to his burnished expectations. Although Jack’s territorial clashes with another, more powerful drug lord (Fidel Vicioso) are a pivotal component of the film’s story, The House is much more concerned with the unraveling of Jack’s soft-focus dream of familial bliss.

Given the temperament of Jack’s relatives, that dream was perhaps a delusional venture from the start. His father Carlos (Jack Herrera) is a belligerent drunk, and perpetually at war with his exasperated mother Martha (Saundra Santiago), who frets about the family’s standing in the neighborhood. Jack’s brother Richie (Leo Minaya) is a natural doormat, struggling in vain to keep his restless wife Rosa (Flor De Liz Perez) home with their newborn child. Brother Manny (Desmin Borges) is inexplicably perusing and stealing from brother Hector’s (Javier Muñoz) designer wardrobe. Much to Jack’s consternation, his semi-out sister Nadia (Rosal Colon) regularly has her girlfriend over for the night. Meanwhile, Jack’s own sweetheart Lily (Melissa Fumero) is talking marriage, which raises his hackles. Despite his devotion to family, Jack seems to have a kneejerk distaste for commitment. In short, every aspect of Jack’s fantasy is falling short in some respect, and The House is essentially a tragedy—albeit a humorous one—about his efforts to keep everything from falling apart. In addition to Coppola, there’s a bit of Shakespeare in there, not to mention Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, and Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. 

For viewers familiar with director Barrial’s previous feature, the mind-bending science-fiction thriller Pig, The House will doubtlessly feel like an emphatic swing in a quite different direction. Barrial’s latest is as sincere, soapy, and character-driven as Pig was moody, enigmatic, and removed. The director has acknowledged that The House is shaped in part by his own early life as a Cuban-American in Miami, which can be observed in the film’s specific character details and in its broad portraiture of a close-knit but combative Latino clan. Doubtlessly, The House also owes a debt to the life experiences of the late indie filmmaker Joseph Vasquez, who originally penned the film’s screenplay some twenty years ago. The Puerto Rican Vasquez worked autobiographical details from his hard-bitten South Bronx childhood into many of his works, most famously in his 1991 "long night of the soul" comedy-drama, Hangin’ With the Homeboys. The House certainly feels indebted to Vasquez’s life story, although Barrial’s on location shooting in the Bronx and his use of local Caribbean-Latino actors are just as vital to the film’s vivid sense of place. (As in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Delicatessen, the apartment complex is not merely backdrop, but a motif and even a character in its own right.)

As with any film about a garrulous, dysfunctional family, The House flirts with cartoonishness in its depiction of Jack’s quirky, problem-ridden relatives. Moreover, in its determination to present the ugly consequences of Jack’s criminal activities, the film at times strays into histrionics and downright unbelievable plot swerves. Yet Barrial’s film rises above these flaws, in part due to the director’s capable juggling of the film’s myriad tones, but also thanks to the engaging presence of Bonilla. The actor's knee-weakening looks and swagger (the latter slightly tinged with diffidence) captivate whenever he is on screen. Bonilla’s performance and the film’s general preference for Jack’s point of view create a sharp portrait of a compromised but essentially benevolent man who is unable to accept that some things are beyond his control—and rather narcissistically denies the agency of his loved ones as a result. This tends to balance out the film’s comparatively thin characterization of the rest of Jack’s family, who are often distilled down to one or two traits. While there is nothing particularly revelatory in Barrial’s approach to storytelling or in Luca Del Puppo’s camera work, The House That Jack Built is still a rich slice of droll family drama, one that offers a compelling depiction of the breakdown and adjustment of a man’s sanguine expectations.