Touted as the first movie funded entirely by cryptocurrency, writer-director Mitzi Peirone’s Braid is a startling first feature that has a lot more going for it than its unusual bankroll. The movie throws influences from director Stanley Kubrick and 16th century Flemish sculpture into a psychedelic blender for an unsettling and distinctive psychological thriller.
Peirone has explained that the film emerged from a fascination with the modern blur between reality and perception, and a fear that she, “could have dreamed my way through life, all the way to my deathbed, and not even realize it.” Braid centers this core anxiety around what at first, in a flashback, seems like the benign friendship of three young women. But, with the film opening on the three now-adult women disposing of a body, this is clearly not The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
Much of Braid shows you how they got to that violent crossroads. Now in their twenties, the women have taken wildly different paths. Petula (Imogen Waterhouse) and Tilda (Sarah Hay) are smalltime dealers on the run from an angry drug lord. They have 48 hours to pay him back, so they pay a visit to the only person they know with enough money to solve their problems: their now wealthy childhood friend Daphne (Madeline Brewer), who lives alone in an ornate mansion and keeps a fortune hidden in a safe. The catch is that Daphne has long engaged her cohorts in a sadomasochistic roleplaying game in which she plays mother to her friends—and violently punishes the slightest transgression. The only way the runaway dealers can get their payout is to go through Daphne first and play by her unbending rules.
Cinematographer Todd Banhazl promised Peirone that he’d shoot her film, “like Caravaggio on LSD,” which perfectly describes its lurid visuals and dreamlike structure, a sense of stateliness and propriety turned unpredictable and vicious. Banhazl excitedly throws the camera off-center and, perhaps a little too often, upside down, as characters descend into an isolated madness. The rich colors, elegant setting and generous bloodletting puts the film squarely in the tradition of giallo, but unlike that storied genre, these women are not weak vessels exploited by men but formidable agents who gleefully exploit each other. Petula and Tilda have rekindled a destructive game that began in their preteens in order to take advantage of Daphne, who even without any evidence of social media or other internet obsession, has lost her grip on reality. Yet Daphne too has a hold on her friends, leading them to a luxurious, decadent setting that may not offer up the bounty they’re seeking.
With tinted visions that recall Vera Chytilová’s 1966 Czech new wave touchstone Daisies and a train ride that seems to echo Valley of the Dolls, Peirone pays homage to her predecessors but has crafted a fresh vision. And its peculiar funding does point to its theme of the tenuous reality in which technology has irrevocably immersed us. Braid catches us in its sordid tangle and never lets us go.
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