The Spring 2018 collection from design house Rodarte, aka sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy, is aflutter with floaty florals and sheer chiffons and it’s an aesthetic that carries through to their gauzy, terminally insubstantial film directing debut, “Woodshock,” starring, and executive produced by Kirsten Dunst. There’s only so much the word “dreamlike” can cover, but “Woodshock” features it all: double exposures, lens flares, macro close ups, juddering edits, soft-focus sensuality, inexplicable neon pulsations and laser light shows layered over breathy shots of a lissome Dunst unlocking a hitherto unknown boss level of exquisitely feminine dissociation. It’s atmospheric, to be sure, and suggests the sisters (as well as MVP cinematographer Peter Flinckenberg) do have promise as visual stylists. But the film tiptoes around its slender story as if fearful of disturbing its slumber, and falls prey to the chief problem with dreamlike storytelling: other people’s dreams are dull.
Dunst plays Teresa, who works in an artisanal marijuana store (that’s right, mark-1 Mary-Jane is selling Mary Jane) run by Keith, played by Pilou Asbaek who neither looks nor sounds like anyone’s idea of a Keith. In the very opening scene — by far the most affecting in the whole film — Teresa helps her sick mother to die (making this, incidentally, the third assisted-suicide-related title to play in a row here in Venice), by giving her a joint that she has spiked with a few careful drops of a clear liquid from a small brown phial.
Teresa’s woodsman boyfriend Nick (Joe Cole, peripheral) suggests they move out from the wooden house in the woods in which her mother’s wooden bed sits in her wooden room, forlorn and unoccupied. But Teresa is too fond of sorrowfully running her hands along the wooden walls in shallow focus to leave. “Do you ever regret it,” asks Teresa, “cutting everything down?” It would seem not, as Nick then goes away for a while to cut down some wood. This leaves the grieving Teresa alone to go hesitantly back to work with a clearly besotted Keith, who is soon suggesting they extend their sideline in euthanasia services to local Old Sick Guy, Ed (Stephan Du Vall).
What happens next is not terribly clear, but through some sort of presumably accidental mix-up (suggesting the film is a cautionary tale about maybe marking an x or something on the jar with the poisoned weed), Ed is not the one who dies. And with guilt now compounding her loss, Teresa starts to get gradually addicted to the gloomy, doomy high she gets from low doses of the poison, and has long trips in which she caresses the bark of the giant redwoods outside and lets the shower run without getting in. She grows more paranoid, starts levitating and hallucinating out-of-body experiences.
Dunst looks stunning throughout — she hasn’t been this blondely, mystically tragedy-bound since she was Lux Lisbon — and only her determinedly sideswept bangs suggest her offhand elegance requires any effort. And that’s an impression with which the Mulleavys are clearly besotted, from the costuming to the production design: Almost every artfully fractured frame layers floral wallpaper patterns on top of leafy leitmotifs on top of rough woodgrain textures, yet it’s all arranged to give the impression of casualness. Less assured though, is the way in which this heightened and aestheticized milieu intersects (or does not) with the real world. It’s shot in Humboldt County, California, and the high-tech medical weed boutique with its expensive-looking glass jars of quality grass suggests a relatively recent time period, yet people still use rotary phones and don’t seem to own a single laptop or e-book reader between them.
The performances, too, are made featherweight by a script that has more mood than motivation. Incongruous though he is, Asbaek injects some liveliness into his few scenes and does a cool thing with a bird and a toothbrush. But Dunst has a thanklessly dour role here, one she can only ever drape over herself rather than fully inhabit. She is in isolation so much, acting off objects or trip-visions or unseen specters of grief and oncoming psychosis that it can sometimes feel like she’s in an acting workshop with someone just offscreen shouting “Sorrow, Kirsten! Now do paranoia!” Long before Teresa, during one of her episodes, drives a bunch of stakes into the ground, the lack of relatability to her interior life has, well, driven the stakes into the ground.
One bright spot is Peter Raeburn‘s shimmery score which is woozy electronica and diffuse drones marked with surprising bursts of harp. But then filmmaking craft is not the issue here, it’s the timidity of the storytelling that sits in sharp contrast to the boldness of some of the visual and sonic experimentation. And when something definitive finally does happen, it leaves an oddly sour aftertaste in the suggestion that in some ways, the narrative has turned into an anti-euthanasia manifesto; Teresa’s guilt at causing the death of someone who did not want to die appears to be lesser than her retroactive regret at having helped her suffering mother to pass on painlessly. But then, long before “Woodshock” has hinted that assisted suicide is equivalent to plain old killing (or certainly a kind of gateway drug to it) the film’s self-indulgent noodling has made it difficult to care too much what its moral may be, and this reverie among the redwoods has become a slog among the logs. [C]
Check out all our coverage of the 2017 Venice Film Festival here.