Writer/Director Olivia West Lloyd’s feature debut, Somewhere Quiet, picks up after a Final Girl has survived her horror story to examine the psychological toll of surviving. Emphasis on psychological; Somewhere Quiet isn’t interested in the inciting horror event itself but rather in interrogating the complexities that survival brings. It results in a self-assured, genre-bending debut that plunges its heroine into a paranoid nightmare where reality is never what it seems.
We meet Meg (Jennifer Kim) amidst a harrowing escape, bloodied and wandering the street alone. Her husband Scott (Kentucker Audley) comes from an affluent family, and kidnappers held Meg captive at ransom for months until she managed to escape. Readjusting to everyday life isn’t easy for Meg, so Scott suggests a quiet weekend away at his family’s seaside estate. Plans for relaxation and recovery go awry when Scott’s cousin Madeline (Marin Ireland) arrives unannounced. Madeline’s disruptive presence and passive-aggressive behavior wreak havoc on Meg, causing recent wounds to reopen as paranoia, nightmares, and horrifying reality shifts ensue.
Lloyd bides her time establishing an off-kilter atmosphere that effectively removes any sense of safety, familiarity, or bearings for her protagonist to grab hold of. Are the microaggressions from Madeline a result of aristocratic arrogance or something more sinister? Why does Scott continue to sleepwalk toward strange family photos of missionary work in Korea? The strange closeness, bordering near flirtation, between Scott and Madeline unnerves. Then there are the eerie visions and nightmares that increasingly threaten to cross into Meg’s waking life.
Kim deftly navigates Meg’s complicated arc, giving every single emotional high and low that comes with PTSD the necessary weight. Tenuous attempts to resume normality give way to small fractures of Scott and Meg’s picture-perfect weekend getaway, then builds with unease as Meg increasingly becomes sure that something’s deeply amiss. Kim impressively brings Meg’s internalized anguish, mistrust, pain, and confused sense of reality to the surface, often nonverbally. There’s nothing tidy or straightforward about recovery, and neither is Meg’s story; Somewhere Quiet centers around a protagonist afforded the space to toggle between empathetic, unreliable, and even unlikable. Audley and Ireland fare just as strongly in this character study.
It’s in the bold choice to refuse easy answers that Lloyd’s debut will polarize. Somewhere Quiet prefers to mine its psychological terror from drama over scares, though the filmmaker does inject a few nightmarish scenarios and horror when needed. Lloyd also refuses to handhold or offer easy answers; there are none. Red herrings and thematic teases enter the equation in the bid to paint a somber portrait of a woman who survived months in captivity only to discover she’s irrevocably changed in a world no longer the same. While Lloyd refreshingly gives her characters the space to be so profoundly broken and sometimes outright untrustworthy, it can sometimes make it tough to grasp Meg’s account, especially when the genre elements ramp up.
That Lloyd matches Meg’s erratic and occasionally volatile nature in tone and genre means Somewhere Quiet defies easy categorization. But it only contributes to the fascinating character study that steadfastly withholds artificial catharsis. For those that don’t mind wading into the darker recesses of a fractured mind, Somewhere Quiet offers a melancholic, intimate, and moody seaside epilogue of a Final Girl’s story.
Somewhere Quiet made its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.
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