When Akin arrives at the farm, he finds his job. Bored and driven by sinister urges, Samantha, the daughter of his employer makes eyes at Aiken while he works the field; as he slips away to masturbate, images of her scowling presence flit through his consciousness. Therefore, Akin's interactions with the father and daughter become awful.
Josephine Decker's dreamlike quasi-thriller of primitive psychology and goatish sexuality offers a setup that suggests 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' as filtered through Terrence Malick, but then proceeds at its own off-step pace.
Ms. Decker especially likes to cut away from a shot just as or before it catches an actor's glance (or catches our eye). It's a device that risks growing mannered.
Decker's Thou Wast Mild & Lovely is certainly unique, if a kinda sorta sex thriller made in a nature-lovin', oddly edited, narratively dithering Terrence Malick manner counts as unusual.
Like most classic stories, this one is simple, but its realization is so surprising in its details, so original in its visual invention, as to make most other movies seem (at least temporarily) shot by the numbers.
Our glimpses of what's already occurred and what will soon come are vivid and impressionistic, prophetic warnings about which everyone seems powerless to do anything other than silently observe.
Decker concocts a wholly enveloping vision of isolation told with a grimly poetic style that wanders all over the place but never stops playing by its own eerie rulebook.
