Trey Edward Shults’ “Krisha,” the 2015 SXSW Grand Jury Winner, begins and ends on a face.
The face belongs to Krisha Fairchild, Shults’ aunt and his film’s titular character. In the first shot, her expression is a curious one, an intriguing portent of potential turmoil. She’s weathered, a bit blank and absent in a way that insinuates not disillusionment, but exhaustion.
In the final shot, a similar expression on the same face transforms from portent to holding tank — it comes to bear the weight of all the revelations and emotional gymnastics the audience had endured across the last 83 minutes, expressing a level of anguish we couldn’t possibly have projected onto it when the film began.
Not that “Krisha” is all anguish (or, as that paragraph implies, a test of endurance). Fairchild, who plays a character created as a composite of Shults’ cousin and father, possesses a sprightly, rough-edged charm that counterbalances the film’s foray into darkness and its somber emotional palette.
The story is simple — Krisha returns to her sister’s house for Thanksgiving after a period of distance from her family. Everyone is weary of her reemergence. She strives to prove herself reformed to her sisters, her son, her mother and her boorish brother-in-law. Things go wrong. Skeletons burst forth from closets. If you pitched it to your film professor, he might say that it all sounds a bit played out.
Well, it is and it isn’t.
Shults, who worked as a production assistant on two upcoming Terrence Malick films (the musician-focused romance “Weightless” and documentary “Voyage of Time”), renders the situation’s psychological intensity with astonishing skill.
While he starts out in full Malick mode, a distant, fluid camera following Krisha down a suburban Texas street in a lurching single take, he eventually pulls from films like Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” and Alex Ross Perry’s “Queen of Earth” to equate the tension in Krisha’s mind with horror movie conventions.
As it progresses, the film becomes impossible to divorce from Krisha’s point of view. It has a relentless subjectivity that stands in contrast to Malick’s relentless objectivity.
Shults’s camera swirls, fumbles and tiptoes around the contours of the family home where all of the action takes place. Often, a discordant, relentless collection of strings and percussion dominates the soundtrack. We cut across multiple conversations and activities at once, watching them all blend together.
In one particularly memorable sequence, Shults follows up a tense conversation between Krisha and her son with the sounds of Krisha’s niece singing her newborn baby a lullaby. The camera quietly floats down a darkened hallway where faded family photos warp into pointed taunts. In another, Nina Simone’s rendition of “Just In Time” plays over the dreamy, slow-motion collapse of Thanksgiving dinner, complete with a falling turkey and repeated POV shots from a kitchen floor.
Without ever becoming opaque, “Krisha” is unusual — an honest and unnerving sensory immersion in emotional distress.
The film’s other unconventional selling point is that Shults casts his own family members, a group of nonprofessional actors, to play characters heavily based on their lives. Shults himself even appears in a major role, playing a young filmmaker.
Because he heavily bases the action of the film on real things that these people have done, viewers gets a sense that they are watching everyday people act out a thinly veiled psychodrama in order to come to terms with their real-life demons, and the sensation is as compelling as it is unsettling.
Unfortunately, not everything in “Krisha” works.
While nearly all of the performances achieve an arresting level of emotional honesty that hardly betrays the actors’ lack of professional training, the script can be creaky. One character refers to Krisha as “heartbreak incarnate” and then “disaster incarnate” in two separate, frustrated outbursts.
Even though Shults’s film succeeds by immersing us in Krisha’s anguish and uncertainty, it can’t escape the fact that we’ve seen this story before. Many times. Thanksgiving is a loaded family symbol, but it’s one that’s been pretty much mined for all it’s worth. Beyond the ingenuity of the filmmaking itself lies a story with little to say that hasn’t already been said.
It can be moving to watch self-destructive characters, particularly addicts, struggle with the effects that their behavior has on their family. “Krisha” shows us the seductiveness of self-destruction in high-stress situations and it’s affecting, but it’s also nothing new. At the end of the day, we’ve seen this story before, and nothing can stop that fact from rendering some of the drama inert.
Then there’s the film’s ending. It’s tough to parse because it’s pulled from the real ending to the real story about Shults’s real cousin. “Krisha” is a film, and regardless of its veracity, it operates under certain dramatic constraints that dictate its success as a piece of storytelling.
Part of me thinks the film’s ending is beautiful. It gives us an “American Beauty”-style collage of moments from Krisha’s life and culminates in a plot point that feels, as the cliché goes, both inevitable and surprising.
Part of me, though, feels like it’s somewhat unearned. So much of the movie exists in abstract space that we sometimes lose touch with the concrete facts of what happened to Krisha. So when we reach the film’s denouement, her actions don’t hold the real, palpable resonance that they should. We should wince. Instead, we could be forgiven for shrugging.
There’s no argument that “Krisha” announces Shults as a formidable new voice in American cinema. He recalls John Cassavetes in his uncanny knack for capturing human experience in accessible, unusual ways.
One simply wishes that he were working with material that matched the freshness of his approach. Perhaps now that he’s exorcised what needed exorcising at home, he can turn his focus outward and help us see the world through the newest of eyes — the invigorating lens of his camera.
“Krisha” opens Friday at Kendall Square Cinema.
