It starts with a face. Fiercely resolute and heavily creased with a shock of silver hair, Krisha stares straight back at us. She announces her presence with a ferocity that isn’t often afforded female characters, especially not those over the age of 60. Krisha is the debut of Trey Edward Shults, and it has all the qualities a first feature should. It’s experimental in style, biting in content and bold in execution. The film follows Krisha over the course of a single day, packing in all the emotional turbulence and dramatic suspense that a 24-hour timespan could possibly contain.
Krisha (Krisha Fairchild) arrives with a truck, a suitcase and a dog. She lumbers toward the front door of a large, suburban home and rings the doorbell. When no one answers, she tries the next house. On the way, she steps into a nasty puddle and curses with a rage that’s darker than it should be. Who is this woman and why can’t we take our eyes off her? She shakes off the muck and keeps walking, evidently a person prone to making mistakes. The family that opens the door and welcomes her inside watches her with expressions of distant awe. They haven’t seen her for a long, long time. Did I mention this entire scene occurs within a single take? It’s a breathtaking introduction to a character we may never forget.
Thanksgiving dinner proves a struggle for Krisha because she’s been estranged for some time. Her sister Robyn (Robyn Fairchild) and her brother-in-law Doyle (Bill Wise) are prepared to forgive her, but the same isn’t true for her son Trey (Shults). She tries to sit with him and mend their broken bond, but he’s not willing to let her back into his life. While Shults’ camera is partial to Krisha, a flawed though sympathetic figure, he leaves it up to us to decide what’s fair. Maybe Trey’s resistance to his mother is a form of self-protection.
Krisha is filled with a cast of characters who look startlingly like real people. That’s because Shults used members of his family as actors, including his cousins, his mother and his 90-year-old grandmother who gives the most realistic portrayal of dementia ever seen on screen (she actually has it). These real-life connections give Krisha not only authenticity but a sense of urgency. Plot points were taken from Shults’ own life and it shows in the film’s unblinking realism. There are moments when the inexperience of non-actors becomes evident in physical awkwardness or artificial lines, but it’s forgivable. There’s even something endearing about these moments. It’s as though Krisha is a hybridization of fiction and home video.
When Krisha seasons the turkey, Shults works hard to build suspense and turn the dead bird into a sacrificial symbol. His choppy cuts raise tension, but they aren’t necessary. The suspense is already there, lying in Krisha’s face. Incorporating zooms and playing with the aspect ratio, Shults is still finding his footing as a director, but his willingness to take such risks is promising. With its overlapping dialogue, eerie mood and pensive shots, Krisha feels indebted to Robert Altman’s superlative 3 Women. Krisha even gets her skirt caught in the car door exactly as Shelley Duvall did in the 1977 film.
Music by Brian McOmber reflects the chaos onscreen. McOmber is a former member of the Dirty Projectors and he continues that band’s legacy of anarchic percussion. He’s an experienced musician, incorporating many different instruments, and at times it’s too much. Since the drama in Krisha is contained, perhaps the music should have been too. The arrival of Nina Simone’s “Just in Time,” however, is one of the most brilliant uses of song on film in the last decade. Simone’s voice stands as the perfect complement to Krisha’s internal battle of love, disappointment and alienation. In fact, Krisha is not unlike Simone. She calls to mind Adam Shatz’s recent profile of Simone, writing of the singer, “So long as she felt adored, she was full of mischievous, salty banter…But if she felt slighted, she could be explosive, even violent.”
“The life of the individual is a constant struggle, and not merely a metaphorical one against want or boredom, but an actual struggle against other people.” Written by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in the 1800s, his words remain true. Reality is hard. Emotions, time, relationships—these facts of life take effort, responsibility and a certain amount of hard-won maturity. For some, it’s too much to bear. Krisha is one such person, and the experience of watching her struggle speaks to something deep inside us. The film ends with Krisha staring back at us. It’s like the shot from beginning, except neither she nor the audience is quite the same.