Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Nothing is as it seems when a woman experiencing misgivings about her new boyfriend joins him on a road trip to meet his parents at their remote farm.
Charlie Kaufman's adaptation of Iain Reid's novel is a deeply layered, surrealist psychological thriller that defies easy categorization. The plot operates on multiple levels simultaneously—surface road trip, philosophical meditation, and fractured identity study—earning genuine distinction. The acting, particularly Jesse Plemons and Jessie Buckley, is remarkable: naturalistic yet uncanny, sustaining tension in long, claustrophobic exchanges. Cinematography by Łukasz Żal is immaculate, with cold, wintry frames that feel both mundane and deeply wrong, serving the dread perfectly. Novelty is exceptionally high—this is unmistakably a Kaufman film, singular in voice, layering existentialism, Pauline Kael quotes, musical theater, and identity dissolution into something no other filmmaker would or could make. The ending is genuinely ambitious and emotionally resonant but proves divisive and arguably collapses under the weight of its own abstraction, with the Oklahoma! sequence being either genius or indulgent depending on tolerance—held back slightly for its accessibility issues rather than any failure of intent.