In their secluded farmhouse, a mother (a former surgeon) teaches her daughter, Francisca, anatomy, and how life and death are not to be feared. One afternoon, a mysterious visitor shatters the idyll of their family life, and deeply traumatises Francisca, but also awakens curiosities. Years later, Francisca clings to her increasingly distant father, but the trauma she sustained reawaken when her desire to connect with the world around her takes on a dark form.
Writer/director Nicolas Pesce makes an accomplished transition from music videos with this darkly disturbing slice of American Gothic that wears its debts to Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) with quiet pride. Divided into three chapters, the story charts how the murder of her Portuguese surgeon mother (Diana Agostini) impacts upon a young farm girl (played variously by the creepily angelic Olivia Bond and gracefully gruesome dancer Kika Magalhäes), whose outward innocence masks a chillingly logical cruelty. The lilting Amália Rodrigues fados on the soundtrack and the beauty of Zach Kuperstein's widescreen monochrome imagery belie the brutality of action that (thanks to Michael Kurihara's sound work) is definitely not for the squeamish. But, despite the hideous fates that befall homicidal salesman Will Brill, Japanese student Clara Wong and young mother Flora Diaz, this teasingly elliptical melodrama is more a psychological study of loneliness and the need for love than it is a generic shocker.
| role | name |
|---|---|
| Francisca | Kika Magalhäes |
| Mother | Diana Agostini |
| Charlie | Will Brill |
| Lucy | Flora Diaz |
| Father | Paul Nazak |
| Kimiko | Clara Wong |
| Young Francisca | Olivia Bond |
| Antonio | Joey Curtis-Green |
| role | name |
|---|---|
| Director | Nicolas Pesce |
