Saturday, October 29, 2016

Werewolf: Ashley McKenzie


I'll probably need to see Ashley McKenzie's Werewolf 2-3 more times to truly understand it. It's not opaque or esoteric, there's just so much going on inside it that it can't all be appreciated in just one sitting. There's the way McKenzie uses her cameras to depersonalize her methadone addict protagonists during their visits to the Canadian medical bureaucracy to get their daily doses: watch how she chops them up with her framing, cutting off the tops of their heads, the whole of their bodies beneath their necks. Then there's McKenzie's uses of visual matching which seems more akin to poetry than to modern cinema. She'll pair a closeup of a methadone spigot with an ice cream shop soft-serve nozzle. Werewolf is a very quiet, very introspective film whose pace might frustrate casual viewers. I see a lot of these kinds of films, especially during film festival season. But this is one of the rare exceptions where the filmmaker actually has something interesting to say.

8/10

No comments:

Post a Comment