05/09/2017 Richard Brody
The Maryland Film Festival, in Baltimore, has long been one of the crucial showcases for independent films. This year’s festival, from which I’ve just gotten back, has a new home, the Parkway Theatre (formally, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Parkway Film Center), which is a renovation and expansion of a movie theatre that has been in the center of town since 1915 and that had previously been shuttered since the nineteen-seventies. The main hall is a majestic space, with a sweeping balcony, a dramatic ceiling, and enticing terra-cotta details. Two smaller theatres, plus a spectacular glass-walled lounge that invites the city into the room and opens the room up to the city, have been added. But a festival is made not by its theatre but by its movies, and this year’s schedule was a cornucopia unmatched in my previous years of attendance—one that reflects major shifts in the world of independent filmmaking.
Ashley McKenzie’s first feature, “Werewolf,” isn’t a horror movie in substance but in spirit. It’s a drama about the virtual possession of souls and transformation of bodies caused by drug addiction, and McKenzie’s miraculous filming of two young people in its grip is similarly poised at the boundary of bodies and souls. Filming on her home terrain of Cape Breton Island, working with nonprofessional actors whom she met there, filling out her cast with people she encountered on location or saw in passing in the street, McKenzie tells the story of a young couple, Blaise (Andrew Gillis) and Nessa (Bhreagh MacNeil), who live in an abandoned trailer while attempting to eke out a living mowing lawns and keep their addictions at bay by participating in their town’s methadone program.
Filming in a quiet place of rustic isolation, McKenzie narrows her scope of vision to discern and magnify tremors of an involuntary and unconscious power. She looks at Nessa and Blaise with an urgent intimacy that often bypasses facial expressions to isolate aspects of the body—including facial features, hand gestures, postures, or even tools and articles of clothing—that transmit emotions without declaring them. With the avidity and exaltation of her inventive and probing visual compositions, McKenzie breaks down familiar and overt representations to reveal their concealed and embedded essences. By way of a sure sense of behavior—from Blaise’s exhausted collapse on a stony road to his belligerent negotiation with a mechanic, from Nessa’s determined exertions with the mower to her effort to master the gestures and procedures of a new job— McKenzie fuses a documentary-like observational precision with a creative imagination that endows her characters’ struggles with a quietly monumental grandeur.