Young indy filmmaker, Allison (the woman in the first shot), is met by her bnb host Gabe and they stroll through the forest to the lake house, chatting. When asked where her husband is Allison evades the question before shutting it down. She also shuts down the compliments he has started with, claiming to hate flattery. They meet Gabe's wife, the heavily pregnant Blair. Later at dinner tension develops between the trio, at first soothed and then heightened by wine (Blair is drinking way beyond the medical recommendation). We move into the living room and everything heats up to the point where Blair accuses Gabe of adultery in the heart. A cataclysm later and ....
That would be a spoiler. What isn't really a spoiler is to say that, after an intertitle, we return to the opening scene of Allison on the jetty. This time she walks all the way to the house and on to an outdoor staircase where a young man arrives to give her a cigarette. "CUT!" She backtracks and we see a camera crew on a barge. Gabe, the director and her husband, wants her to do the take again. She protests that he's always wanting too much and that co-star Blair never gets this treatment. He berates her in front of everyone and storms off. The A.D. does the retake. Gabe is inside directing it with a tablet and an earpiece as Blair watches. These two then conspire to appear as though they've bee intimate before dinner to ruffle Allison to get a heightened performance from her.
And so on. This film doesn't just shift identities but claims of identity. Is the opening exchange where Gabe is played by Gabe the reality that inspired the film within the film? Blair is his wife there and Allison the usurper. In the film being made Blair is the threat and neither is pregnant. A great many claims of fealty and infidelity are made between these players (there's an actor playing Gabe in the movie section) which is the central maypole they're dancing around. What of Allison's choice at the end of that? What of the return again to the opening sequence?
We are looking at performance and performance within performance. The central trio hold their positions well over some very slippery ground. Aubrey Plaza goes from the kind of understated millennial snark of her schtick to way beyond it into heavy anger. Sarah Gadon almost travels the opposite journey by way of balance (I've never seen her so animated). Christopher Abbot is the steadiest presence but then he goes from manipulated to manipulating so smoothly it's not initially obvious. The scene at the beginning where they are all getting increasingly drunk and emtionally loose is a masterclass of ensemble acting (with drunkenness thrown in as a curve ball).
We are also looking at the imagining of fiction to confront difficult truths. For all the claims of virtue made by these people there is an everpresent likelihood that they are lying to get through the moment. Claims of strong commitment begin to sound like manipulation. Is that not the point of cinema, at least fictive cinema? To make wishes and heroics solid but through manipulation? There is no attempt to laud the cinematic production process as a particularly noble endeavour as the barely controlled chaos of wardrobe, coffees, internally political bitchiness, subversion and predation bashes around the roving handheld camera that pretends it isn't there. Done before? But like fourth wall breaks, multimedia, reflexivity, maybe we just need to remember some things to remember what cinema is, can be, and why it's still good for us.
I'll rant about this in the eventual summary of the Festival but this film was available for a five hour window on one night only. Is that licencing restriction? A clunking sense of event imposed on punters? Either way, I hate it: if you've got the tech to roll things out to the benefit of people who might still have time constraints (determined by kid management or whatnot) make all of it float on the whole timeline. Anyway....
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