Writer(s): Peirone
Starring: Madeline Brewer, Imogen Waterhouse, Sarah Hay, and Scott Cohen
Braid has a good cast, excellent production design, and gorgeous photography: all it’s missing is an idea. It feels like a random collection of images and partially-realized sequences, held together by an ambiguous, threadbare plot, and an ending that never actually seems to arrive. I don’t like to throw the term “pretentious” around very often, and while I think I would stop short of actually putting that label on this one (I think it's at least trying to be genuine, rather than being artsy for artsy's sake), I have to admit it’s a word that popped in my head more than once.
Two girls--who are on the run from the police after a drug bust destroys their only source of income—decide to revisit their psychotic friend with whom they have fallen out of touch. The reason? Somewhere within her oversized mansion is a safe, and inside that safe is a lot of money. Enough, they figure, to pay back all the money they owe for their confiscated stash, while also leaving some to live off of, at least for a while.
But Daphne isn’t a typical friend: she’s a full-on psycho. And in order to get the money, they must enter the imaginative world the three of them created when they were younger. This world has three rules, which we are repeatedly beaten over the head with, lest we forget: Rule #1: everyone must play; rule #2: no outsiders; and #3: no one leaves.
Well, that doesn’t sound like a very fun game, and it only takes us about ten minutes before we first realize that this was probably the least practical way they could have accessed the cash. I mean, robbing a bank would probably be a more simple approach than having to deal with Daphne, who clearly gets macabre joy out of watching others suffer, and who pretends to be the mother she could never be, what with her barren womb and all. And while the final “twist” seems to excuse many of the film’s narrative weaknesses, it doesn’t change anything at all about how boring it is to slog through.
Unsurprisingly, it’s a critical darling, because it’s exactly the type of movie to appeal to that crowd: a story with great visuals, and an ambiguous story that they can discuss at length over rounds of craft beers and overpriced wines. The kind of movie that they all pretend to “get”, so they can continue to appear “hip” and “trindie” (a mix of “indie” and “trendy”) to their fellow peers. Yet what's on screen seems like the end result of a group of friends shooting random footage in a cool location they secured for a day, then attempting to piece together a sensical narrative based around those random sequences at a later time. It’s rarely gripping, and even by the time we get to the obligatory bloodshed—which just feels like it was thrown in to “wake-up” its dozing audience—it’s long past the point of redemption.
I’m completely shocked writer-director Mitzi Peirone hasn’t worked on music videos (at least, per her IMDb page), because there are many sequences that recall the type of quick-cut editing and visual flourishes from that type of media. I think she would flourish in a medium like that, where stories have to be summed up in around five minutes, and she can run wild with the visuals. Indeed, she has an eye for composition and production design because—no matter what you personally think of them—you can't deny she produces some striking imagery.
However, she seems to think that all you need to create a dreamlike atmosphere are bright colors and altered audio effects. Actually, in some ways, creating an “accurate” dreamland is even more difficult than creating a linear reality, in that the random sequences have to feel like they make sense together, even if they don’t (to the viewer). Take the works of David Lynch as one example: A film like Mulholland Drive works because, even through its fractured, confusing storyline (that may or may not even exist), there are enough “callbacks” and similarities between scenes that not only do you get to know the main characters (or at least think you do), but you can tell they are a part of the same cinematic universe.
That's not so here, and it's also the main reason why Braid's 85 minute runtime somehow manages to not only feel stretched by at least twenty minutes, but also longer than some that run two hours.
RATING: 4/10
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