Catherine has entered a particularly dark period in her life: her father, a famous artist whose affairs she managed, has recently died, and on the heels of his death she's dumped by her boyfriend James. Looking to recuperate, Catherine heads out to her best friend Virginia's lake house for some much needed relaxation. However, once Catherine arrives relaxation proves impossible to find, as she is overcome with memories of time spent at the same house with James the year before. As Catherine reaches out to Virginia with attempts at connection, Virginia begins spending increasing amounts of time with a local love interest, Rich, and fissures in the relationship between the two women begin to appear, sending Catherine into a downward spiral of delusion and madness.
It displays some of the navel-gazing impulses of the mumblecore movement; it's no surprise to see that mumble-originator Joe Swanberg serves as a producer.
The mood is akin to Ingmar Bergman's Persona or Roman Polanski's Repulsion. So don't watch expecting a barrel of laughs. You might, though, detect hints of dark comedy.
Writer-director Alex Ross Perry conjures such a strong atmosphere around his characters -- and Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston are so powerful in the leads --that one gets sucked into their emotional conflict.
Perry may never make a movie for the masses, whoever they are. But his truest work burrows into weird, blackly comic places few other filmmakers would dare explore.
It makes for a slightly muddled palette, but one that, like one of those lenticular pictures that changes depending on the angle it's viewed from, can seem either darkly cynical or harrowing.
