★★
A socially awkward woman with a fondness for arts and crafts, horses, and supernatural crime shows finds her increasingly lucid dreams trickling into her waking life.
Classification: 15
While rooted in deeply personal material for star and co-writer Alison Brie, this psychological drama about a misfit losing grip of her reality never accelerates or excites beyond a few moments of surreal imagery and soothing music. Sarah, Brie's naive fictional surrogate shares Brie's real-life family history of paranoid schizophrenia and initially, she's the archetype indie film protagonist similar to Brie Larson's character in Unicorn Store; a socially awkward dreamer who connects to fantasies (horses and crime shows) rather than to the reality around her. Horse Girl's director and co-writer Jeff Baena initially uses this assumption to lull the audience into a false sense of security but there is no drive to his direction, this lull extending throughout most of the runtime making the audience feel they're sleepwalking through Sarah's breakdown.
Brie's performance is the focal point to Horse Girl while the film never finds its footing in how to portray the more uncomfortable elements to its story, Brie's commitment in portraying Sarah's fears and vulnerability is agonizing to watch. To lose control of your understanding, to find yourself standing in a strange place suddenly, no idea how you got there and then to question the very nature of who you are is a heady and unsettling concept and Brie brings across all of Sarah's issues in an empathetic way. The final film may not engage its audience particularly well but Brie and Baena's vision of mental illness in this film always felt insightful than exploitative, avoiding commonplace tropes of wacky characters and really focusing on awkward truths. Sarah's outlets; arts and crafts, horse and a supernatural crime show named Purgatory (I enjoyed how Robin Tunney appeared as the fictional lead, as she has starred in other gimmick-based procedural dramas) become twisted as her anxieties of her grandmother's illness alienate everything around her. This is where Horse Girl loses a lot of its momentum as Baena leads the audience through Sarah's belief that she is her grandmother's clone, that alien abductions are responsible for the missing time and that an extraordinary explanation is responsible for the upsetting events. However, there is no tension to this at it is painfully clear to be a mental illness affecting Sarah than any paranormal interference and leaves the film with little drive through the runtime.
Horse Girl moves slowly and doesn't arrive at any comprehensive catharsis for its lead character, yes the more obscure techniques suggest that Sarah understands what's happening to her is a possibility but the film can't shake the feeling that it doesn't go anywhere. Baena seeming to rely on surreal imagery and having Sarah's confusion substitute for narrative depth than seek to explore what is actually happening to her, the audience never develops a motivated investment to her story beyond standard empathy. The film gets lost in its surrealism and while there are some creative transitions in Ryan Brown's editing, the film just meanders through it all, Brie still captivates with her performance but Horse Girl never finds its purpose trying to make dramatic tension from its tragedy.
Well-intentioned but forgettable, Brie and Baena are able to get audiences into the mind of Sarah's character but once there, they seem to be as lost as the rest of us. It's a difficult subject without clear answers and while Horse Girl reflect that, it is not effective ambiguous storytelling, it just feels more like indie film gone weird at times. The personal performance from Alison Brie really does make the most distressing scenes to the film extremely powerful but much like Sarah, Horse Girl leaves this dreamer lost in confusion with little clarity to what's actually happening around her.
Director: #JeffBaena
Screenwriter: #JeffBaena and #AlisonBrie
Release Date: February 7th 2020
Available exclusively on Netflix
Trailer:
Written review copyright ©CoreyBullochReviews
Images and Synopsis from the Internet Movie Database
Comments