Wright | 2021 | UK & USA

3rd watch. A film I’ve gone all the way around the world with. I really didn’t care for it the first time. I don’t have notes from that viewing but l remember feeling like there was a good movie in here that was never quite drawn out; interesting parts that failed to make a cohesive whole. The second viewing a few months later uncovered nothing new, though I recall finding it more palatable. Flash forward 3.5 years and something about this movie just continued to gnaw at me so down I sat and, well, I more or less love it now. The Girl will call it “A Classic Greg Move”.

The boundary between this and that – between here and somewhere else – is so thin as to be transparent. David Lynch would remind us that the truth is just in the next room (if only we could get into that room). The passageways between here and there which the film conveys are never explained to the audience and it finally occurred to me that they don’t need to be. There is a door – a threshold – and that is all we need to know.

It may also be true that if we possess the ability and willingness to cross these thresholds, we will do so through portals as commonplace as music and at locations in space and time to which we are drawn with a force equal to our interest in them. The tuning fork indicates a straightforward path but that path can lead to madness if navigated with naiveté.

And that, more or less, is what this film captures (if imperfectly). The glittering allure of fantasy slips blinders on our eyes as we follow the road and we may find ourselves consumed not only by our own madness, but also by the haunted and sinister madness of others. We might be admiring the reflection in the mirror; we might be the reflection.

Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy are sublime as the two sides of a psycho-tragic coin. Although this film would probably like for you to think it’s horror, there’s little here that is scary in the traditional sense. What is truly haunting is the idea that these cycles of tragedy – dreaming and falling (under the weight of exploitation) – continue to occur. If Eloise and Sandie are two sides of a coin, it is a coin that continues to flip.