Complete Unknown would be one of the year’s best short films, had director Joshua Marston not unwisely stretched it out for 90 minutes. It has a single theme, a direct and uncomplicated thesis, engaging performances from big-name actors and an enthralling opening act. But the last hour is excruciating, unnecessary and ruins the electric excitement generated in the early scenes by rehashing the same story beats without the requisite tension or novelty they had the first time through.
The female protagonist—she has many names, the most enduring of which is “Alice”—(Rachel Weisz) specializes in self-reinvention. Complete Unknown’s captivating exposition-less prologue traces her biography from finding a new apartment in Portland, Oregon, where she recounts her time in the Amazon, to being an emergency room nurse somewhere unspecified, to working as a magician’s assistant in China, to a mysteriously emotional dalliance in Ohio, to her time as a teacher in South Africa and, finally, to an intense open-water swim at some unknown beach. What is established in these initial six minutes is that Alice is a liar—two lies are revealed through the limited dialogue—and a globetrotting adventurer.
Over the next 15 minutes, Marston introduces us to two new characters, Tom (Michael Shannon) and Clyde (Michael Chernus), who work as environmentalist-minded agricultural lobbyists. Clyde is in an ambiguous relationship with Alice, Tom is reluctantly hosting his own birthday party and Alice accompanies Clyde to Tom’s house. What ensues is a restive and decidedly unusual dinner gathering. There are eight people in total in attendance and most of them are socially aggressive and anger-prone; they are not adept conversationalists and seem to actively dislike each other. The proceedings come across as artificial, but Marston is going for realism. Exacerbating the issue, the cinematography and editing are amateurish and obfuscatory. This is where the film begins to break apart. Maintaining the viewer’s interest, however, is Tom’s obvious discomfort and familiarity with Alice, supposedly a total stranger. This generates suspense even within the otherwise disastrous scene.
Marston is impetuous and does not maintain the mystery surrounding Tom’s unease with his newest party guest for very long. This is a silly choice, as this revelation is all the material the film has left. Through some ham-fisted dialogue, both Tom and Alice begin to reveal their intertwined pasts at the dinner table; it is an execrably written and photographed scene. Both leave the party and Tom confronts Alice, who he knows as Jenny. Jenny/Alice was Tom’s first flame, when he was in college and she was a piano prodigy; one day she vanished without a trace. She went to Mexico, winding her way down the continent to the Amazon, from which she travelled to Portland, initiating the prologue’s now-explained biographical sequence.
Given what ensues over the next hour of runtime, Complete Unknown should have ended at Jenny/Alice’s confession. Its thesis about identity being performative (which is also the film’s tagline in its IMDB ads) was fully realized by this point, and it becomes readily apparent that Marston is out of ideas. Even the narrative and visual details are richest in the first third of the film. For instance, Tom’s wife speaks English as a second language and Tom never bothered to learn her first language (Farsi), a telling characteristic playing on the thesis about identity—how can he be a husband if he cannot know his wife in her native tongue? These crucial wrinkles are abandoned (a film on relationships in-translation would have been thrilling) along with everything else engaging about the characters.
For one fleeting scene a few minutes after the big reveal, the film seemed poised to become a re-telling of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura in reverse, but that potentially-delightful opportunity was squandered in favor of restating the thesis over and over and over again. What began as a scintillating film sparkling with true craftsmanship—the sound editing in the prologue and early scenes of Tom and Clyde is especially superb—smashes itself repeatedly on the rocky shores of over-done narrative sameness. It would have been a helluva short, though.
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