Take Me to the River Movie What Is the Family Secret

The first time I saw "Accept Me to the River" was at its premiere at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, but while watching the flick again more a year later, its touch on came rushing back to me in the first few minutes. I felt that tightness in my chest and breadbasket, that mix of anticipation of a film you know is terrific and the dread of knowing yous're about to be put through the wringer.

Information technology'due south the feeling echo viewers get when they picket Janet Leigh bank check into the Bates Motel, or when Ruth Gordon gives Mia Farrow a pendant with some tannis root in it. "Take Me to the River" isn't a horror movie, but then it's not not a horror movie, either. It's a slowly tightening vise, all about suspicion and hostility and resentments and what people aren't talking about when they talk to each other.

A stunning debut feature from writer-managing director Matt Sobel, "Take Me to the River" is Polanski, with cicadas.

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Roger Ebert ofttimes spoke of movies that were frustrating because the plot could exist solved past a v-minute conversation that no one is having, but what gives this movie such power is the nighttime burden that secrets place upon the lives of its characters and the toxicity that forms when nosotros're not honest with each other.

The subterfuge begins in the opening scene, a auto ride that takes teenager Ryder (Logan Miller, "Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse") and his parents Cindy (Robin Weigert, "Deadwood") and Don (Richard Schiff) to a family unit reunion in Nebraska. Ryder wants to be open up with Cindy'south relatives almost the fact that he's gay, only Cindy asks him to avert bringing up any touchy subjects.

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TAKE ME TO THE RIVER Robin Weigert Photo by Thomas Scott Stanton At a barbecue the next day, nine-twelvemonth-old Molly (Ursula Parker, "Louie") attaches herself to her "California cousin." (Ryder, angry virtually having to become back into the closet, wears red short-shorts, a deep-V-neck T-shirt and yellow sunglasses.) Molly asks Ryder to take her to the barn on the property, where she wants to climb on the hay bales and reach upwardly to the birds' nests in the eaves.

What happens next takes place off camera, simply a screaming, bleeding Molly comes running back to the house, followed by a perplexed Ryder. He insists nothing untoward happened, only Molly's father — Cindy's brother Keith (Josh Hamilton) — becomes furious, threatening bodily harm to Ryder and not allowing Cindy, a physician, to examine the daughter.

And and so begins a sequence of events whereby one-time family resentments are aired (Keith stayed in Nebraska to accept care of the subcontract while Cindy went west for grad school) and shocking secrets emerge. The ambulation and the emerging, nevertheless, don't have place in the grandly soap-operatic mode to which nosotros've become accustomed in moving-picture show and television. Instead, bits of information have to be gleaned from betwixt the lines, as Ryder feels the escalating tension (including mean graffiti on the family unit motorcar, which Cindy, who constantly operates in no-really-everything-is-fine mode, tin't hide from her mother and husband fast enough).

The second half of the movie involves Keith sending another daughter over to invite Ryder to an apology lunch that'south as smash-biting as any action sequence that features a flop and a big ruby digital read-out. Hamilton has a manner of smiling and glad-handing that's more unsettling than Keith's violent temper, and that entire section of the film is a brilliant practice in making the audience wait for the other shoe to drib.

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Veteran character actor Hamilton is i player in a formidable ensemble — relative newcomer Miller guides united states of america through this unknown and possibly unsafe world, making viewers experience his panic and outsider-dom at every footstep. Parker, so extraordinary as the younger daughter on "Louie," continues to demonstrate her gifts at mixing childlike naturalism with potentially disturbing adult topics, while Weigert gives united states peeks behind the mask of a perfectionist steeped in denial. (Following the exposure of a long-buried incident, Cindy tells Ryder, "And at present nosotros don't accept to talk about this or call up most this ever again.")

Editor Jacob Secher Schulsinger previously worked on "Force Majeure," another movie about discomfiting family unit revelations, and he and Sobel never let the pace slack in a tight 84-minute running time. Even when Sobel cuts away from the achingly brittle dialogue sequences, cinematographer Thomas Scott Stanton shoots trees thick with summertime leaves and fields of wildflowers similar waves in the sea, beautiful just also capable of devouring y'all whole.

"Take Me to the River" is a film I'll definitely come up back to again and again — fifty-fifty though the thought of another viewing is giving me that familiar clench in the chest.

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"The Twilight Zone" (1959)

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"Tales From the Catacomb" (1989)

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"Harper's Island" (2009)

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"Penny Dreadful" (2014)

Beginning's catamenia horror drama "Penny Dreadful," which takes its name from a blazon of cheap sensationalist fiction published in 19th-century United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland, adapts its characters from classic works of fiction, including Oscar Wilde's "The Picture show of Dorian Gray" and Bram Stoker's "Dracula."

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MTV'south tv accommodation of the classic slasher franchise that starred Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox features a whole new bandage, a new killer and a new mask.

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