Krisha

Remem­ber the name Trey Edward Shults. You’ll like­ly be hear­ing it a lot over the next few years. This nifty debut fea­ture is by no means the ful­ly-formed pack­age, and it would be tough to call it sat­is­fy­ing in a super­fi­cial sense, but it presents a direc­tor with an amaz­ing amount of nat­ur­al tal­ent and a will­ing­ness to drag a sto­ry in strange and sur­pris­ing direc­tions. He com­bines the intense, mean­der­ing nat­u­ral­ism of Amer­i­can indie god­head John Cas­savetes with some light exper­i­men­ta­tion – in fact, his film, Krisha, often resem­bles a strange, slight­ly-tapped dis­tant cousin to Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shining.

The title is a ref­er­ence to the film’s star Krisha Fairchild (Shults’ aunt IRL). The open­ing shot sees this seem­ing­ly con­fi­dent, white-haired woman step out of her parked pick-up truck and wan­der down a sub­ur­ban street, only to turn back when she realis­es she’s for­got­ten all of her lug­gage. She then rocks up to the wrong house. She then acci­den­tal­ly steps in a drainage bog when tak­ing a short-cut to the cor­rect venue. It’s a dark har­bin­ger of things to come.

The film depicts a tra­di­tion­al Thanks­giv­ing meal that descends into scream­ing anar­chy. This is large­ly down to Krisha and her unhinged actions. Ini­tial­ly she’s mild-man­nered and hum­bled to be among this diverse flock of peo­ple, but as the hours roll on, we see just why this is such an impor­tant occa­sion for her, and why she allows past demons to rav­age her mind and ruin the fun for every­one. A poor turkey, that has its innards scooped out on cam­era, is one of the film’s key char­ac­ters, and in the end, it gets off lightly.

Inti­mate con­ver­sa­tions with fam­i­ly mem­bers allude to a dark secret, and there is a sense that peo­ple are search­ing for a rea­son to bring Krisha back into the fold. But as details are men­tioned and bro­ken rela­tion­ships fail to mend, she falls back on the old, dark ways. It’s not a hor­ror film, even though Shults infers that a wave of vio­lence could be unleashed at any moment. Its star is repel­lant in way, but she is realised in man­ner that bursts with empa­thy, if not understanding.