The phrase “Joanna Hogg’s Shutter Island” is not a line that many critics expect to bust out in their lifetimes, but with her sixth feature the British director has made a fascinating foray into ge…
in a dual role, but there is also a tremendous sense of unease here, whether one sees it as a spooky story about a woman’s search for self or what it’s like to book a staycation in the UK these days.Swinton plays Julie, a filmmaker who is taking her mother Rosalind on a birthday trip to an ancestral home, which is now a hotel.
To Hogg’s credit, this conceit is adhered to and not abandoned. As they arrive at the hotel, mother and daughter hear the taxi driver’s tale of an eerie face that once appeared at the window there, and Julie’s first night is disrupted by weird sounds that apparently only she can hear. Julie’s mother’s dog Louis — presumably one of the actress’ own stellar pack, which featured heavily in— begins to act strangely, crying in the night and running off when the hotel-room door mysteriously swings open.
At first, the gothic trimmings suggest that they may just exist as a way into this story, while Julie finds her bearings in the creaky old building — shot, by the way, in the heightened style of the cult 1980s British TV show, complete with creepy flute music. However, there is no bait and switch: the veracity of the various supernatural elements may be open to interpretation but the story stays committed to the conflict between the living and the undead.
Such Chinese-box narratives often tend to be oblique and frustrating, not to mention pretentious, but for receptive audiences — and, let’s face it, mostly the middle-aged kind —will hit a very strange but significant nerve as a film about that time in our lives when the things that we take for granted are suddenly snatched away.
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