PLOT: When Carolyn Harper (Raven Whitley) is beaten and left for dead in the woods, her closest friends and troubled parents grapple with the pain and anguish the best they can as the search to find her body continues.
REVIEW: One feature, fourteen shorts, and a quarter-century since making her directorial debut, unwavering indie auteur Jennifer Reeder returns with guile and gusto for her new film KNIVES AND SKIN, a weirdly wicked and wonderfully wildering fever-dream of a coming-of-age tale that proves there’s still a place in the world for uncompromising artistic expression. Put bluntly, this is one of the most bizarre and unique movies I’ve ever had the pleasure to get lost in, tonally melding the perverse dark humor and mystifying hypnotism of say, DONNIE DARKO, HEATHERS, EXOTICA, WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE, with a blended dash of David Lynch’s head-scratching surrealism for good measure. It’s that odd and offbeat. Here’s a movie that ditches plot in favor of character exploration, and one that eschews narrative cohesion for entrancing artistic contrivances. Not everything works in the film as Reeder intends, but more does than doesn’t, and yet it’s precisely the bold and brazen ambition alone deserves most of the plaudits. If you dig engrossing artistic genre-joints that defy description and challenge narrative norms, by all means, cue a cut of KNIVES AND SKIN when it hits select theaters Friday, December 6th.
Somewhere in the Midwest, Carolyn Harper shares a date with high-school letterman Andy (Ty Olwin) out in the woods. Andy wants sex, Carolyn isn’t ready, and when she denies his advances, he pushes her to the ground and leaves her to fend for herself. Soon Carolyn ends up dead, but that’s hardly what this movie is about. No, the film is more concerned with the eclectic characters in Carolyn’s life and how they react to her sudden disappearance. Her mother Lisa (Marika Engelhardt), who teaches Carolyn’s friends in the school choir, is an emotional wreck who cannot cope with her daughter’s vanishing. She indirectly seduces Andy after smelling Carolyn’s scent in his car, and later masturbates furiously through her pantyhose. Yeah, the movie is filled with perverted, uncomfortable scenes that push the boundaries of human tolerance. One of Carolyn’s closest friends, Joanna (Grace Smith), happens to also be Andy’s brother. She likes to do all kinds of weird things like selling her sister Lynn’s (Audrey Francis) dirty underwear and collect jars of bloody tampons. Joanna even spends time hiding with her father Dan (Tim Hopper), a mime who lost his job a year prior. Hell, even Joanna’s Gramma Miriam likes to smoke pot, watch porno and pose nude!
Several other characters comprise the highly attractive multiracial cast. One compelling sub-strand involves a black lesbian love affair between Laurel (Kayla Carter) and Colleen (Emma Ladji), two of Carolyn’s choral classmates. There are at least three or four musical numbers performed among these two, sung harmonically in a cappella, which actually stand out as some of the strongest moments in the movie. In at least two instances of their singing, I felt genuine goose-bumps protrude from my nape. But here’s the thing. For all of the complex characters and the seedy and sordid actions they take, for all of the wonderfully crafted artistic flourishes, for all of the scenes that work wonders by themselves, when everything is added up, not a whole lot are amounted to in the end. Again, Reeder is far less interested in the plotting of Carolyn’s murder and far more attuned to creating artistic emotional expressions, so the incoherence sort of comes with the territory. But we lose sight of Carolyn’s story, which takes a tertiary seat to the series of well-crafted hypnotic one-offs. The loose ends are never tightly knotted together, nor are they much attempted to. While we’re inside the scenes, we cannot look away. When we tally them all up after they’re over, it becomes clear that the sum of the movie doesn’t quite total the quality of its many impressive parts.
The more I think about KNIVES AND SKIN, the harder it is to describe. The movie defies categorization, which is probably the highest compliment you can pay to Reeder for her captivating work here. Among the farrago of freaky imagery is a tone of semi-surrealism that calls to mind the best of Lynch and even the worst of Shyamalan. While there is genuine laughter to be found among the pitch-black humor, absurd scenarios, and quirky lines of dialogue, there are also scenes handled so earnestly and austerely that you almost laugh in the wrong places as well. It’s a delicate line to toe, but Reeder deftly navigates these tonal landmines and delivers one of the strangest and most memorable coming-of-age riffs in a long time. Sure it may seem self-indulgent, particularly since the runtime could be trimmed by 10-15 minutes, but for a movie so unflinching in its vision and unyielding in its attempt to be original, the positives far outweigh the downturns. If nothing else, KNIVES AND SKIN is one of the weirdest experiences to be had at the movies this year, and proves Jennifer Reeder demands our attention moving forward.