Movie Review: Brace yourselves for “Krisha”.

On a moment-by-moment basis, “Krisha,” the stunning directorial debut of Trey Edward Shults, acts as a sort of endurance test: can you sit through it? Can you stay in your seat and watch in unflinching agony as the eponymous woman whose name gives this sharp, ugly little movie its title and who one of the film’s ancillary characters calls “disaster incarnate”, as she goes from a state of being mentally and emotionally unwound to a state of complete spiritual debasement? “Krisha” will no doubt leave audiences with scars of their own, but it’s a formidable debut all the same, one that re-contextualizes the current language of American independent cinema into something rough and shockingly personal. You may not know what hit you when the lights go up after this bleak journey into personal hell reaches its closing moments, but you’ll know at the very least that you’ve seen something.

Before we dive into the movie’s complex web of themes, let us just state the obvious: “Krisha” is a marvel of filmmaking economy, and it’s incredible to see how much the filmmakers have done with so little. Shults shot pretty much the entirety of “Krisha” in his parent’s South Texas home and populated the film with members of his extended family. The movie was crowdfunded, shot on the fly and bears almost no traces of ostentatious production design or extra “coverage,” that filmmaking term that Brian De Palma practically christened as a dirty word. All this goes a long way towards making sure “Krisha” feels bracing and immediate and boy, does it ever. This is a movie designed to make you feel uncomfortable: with its jangling, discordant score, (not dissimilar to Jon Brion’s work on the soundtrack for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love”) the incessant sound of chatter and gossip filling every scene and the roving, invasive camerawork of cinematographer Drew Daniels, “Krisha” couldn’t be less interested in the idea of entertaining its audience or subjecting them to phony moral closure. Its lack of sentiment is admirable, though “Krisha” has got to be one of the most painful viewing experiences I’ve ever sat through. In its own way, Shults’ film turns out to be its own kind of horror movie: it turns the dreaded family dinner into pretty much the most awful thing you could imagine.

When we first see Krisha, she’s staring directly at the camera, on the verge of breaking down completely as Brian McOmber’s sinister score booms and hisses on the soundtrack. What has this woman done to get to this terrible place? To fill in the blanks, Shults winds the clock back one whole day. The opening shot is a doozy: a long, messy handheld take of Krisha, muttering to herself and already indicating some degree of significant mental unrest, as she stumbles through someone’s backyard and stomps over plants, barely keeping it together. We find out just moments later that the house belongs to Krisha’s estranged sister. When she finally finds her way in, Krisha is swept up into a chaotic maelstrom of chatty relatives, resentful brothers-in-law and a group of loud, aggressive young men that includes her own grown-up son, who has very understandable reasons for being mad at his mother. The film proceeds to move at an sinuous crawl, watching in unflinching detail as Krisha struggles to prepare the turkey for dinner, fend off questions about her unsavory past (she’s a recovering addict whose destructive behavior pretty much drove everyone in her family away) and make compromised amends with her son in spite of the increasingly obvious fact that she’s become an unwelcome intruder in her old home.

It’s tempting to wonder just how much autobiography Shults put into the final product here. Shults himself plays Krisha’s grown son Trey as a humble and quiet young man who is clearly ashamed by his mother’s grossly inappropriate behavior and doesn’t want to talk about it much. Krisha Fairchild is Mr. Shults’ real-life aunt, though she gives such a raw and magnificent performance here as the title character that some viewers will have a tough time believing she’s a non-professional. She commits to Krisha’s full-bore descent into oblivion with the seasoned grace of a stage actor, and there’s a magnificent moment in the movie’s final third where Krisha dons a red dress, one whose beauty has all but faded, that’s reminiscent of something John Cassavetes might have staged, (not for nothing does Krisha herself bear a remarkable resemblance to late-career Gena Rowlands) and also of Ellen Burstyn’s harrowing third-act meltdown in Darren Aronofsky’s tonally similar “Requiem for a Dream”.

The rest of the cast is made up of Shults’ real-life family in what essentially amounts to exhibition blending pain and performance art, though a few character actors make interesting impressions around the margins. Local Texas actor Bill Wise, who has appeared in a few Richard Linklater movies including “Boyhood” and “Waking Life,” is particularly funny as Krisha’s fed-up, pissy brother-in-law Doyle, a man whose life has become a moribund joke wherein he can blame all his various grievances on his wife’s ten pet dogs. Doyle hates all of his dogs equivocally, and the fact that he’s this movie’s source of levity should be telling. All of these performers give the seamless impression of being an actual family (presumably, because many of them actually are a part of one) with Ms. Fairchild as the movie’s nucleus of instability, ready to boil over and explode at a moment’s notice. You may want to stop watching at points, but you probably won’t be able to.

Material this risky would hardly work without a brave and committed lead performance at its center, and I cannot reserve enough praise for Krisha Fairchild’s soul-exposing work here. I have no idea what this woman is like in real life, but she so effortlessly becomes this character, who is damaged beyond repair, that I would have a hard time believing that she’s not mining from trauma in her own life. With her gently bronzed skin, unruly streaks of salt and pepper hair and sad, makeup-streamed eyes, Mrs. Fairchild has the look of a former wild child whose days of hell-raising have threatened to derail her well into her sixties. In other words, she looks like she’s lived — a lot. During several sequences, Krisha doesn’t appear to be interacting with members of her family so much as drifting through a vaguely menacing morass of memory and buried conflict: things happen to her; she sees herself as the perpetual victim all while she’s carelessly mowing down the good intentions of anyone in her circle who makes the deadly mistake of caring about her. An unforgettable single-take sequence in which Krisha vengefully calls an old flame and tells her that he’s “dead [to her]” is chilling enough in its quiet intensity to freeze your bloodstream. And in spite of Shults’ limited budget, (the movie cost just around $8,000) he still manages to employ some deft slow-zooms and wide-angle pans in which the young director displays a sophisticated understanding of visual storytelling, even when working within a severely limited framework.

A24 was smart to pick this movie up. I doubt it will have crossover appeal in the same way that more accessible efforts like “Ex Machina” or “Room” have in the past year, but “Krisha” is a considerable work of art nonetheless: an arid and disturbing look at one woman’s broken life, as well as the limits of forgiveness. You probably won’t feel good when this movie reaches its synapse-frying conclusion and that, as smart critics and viewers alike would probably argue, is precisely the point. Here is a film that truly and resolutely believes that the scariest big-screen monsters aren’t ghouls and goblins and vampires and all manners of silly CGI-enhanced beasts, but rather, the people you call family. A-