Ben Foster as Josh McCall in a scene from the movie Sharp Corner.COREY J ISENOR/Elevation Pictures
Sharp Corner
Directed by: Jason Buxton
Written by: Jason Buxton, based on the short story by Russell Wangersky
Starring: Ben Foster, Cobie Smulders and Gavin Drea
Classification: N/A; 110 minutes
Opens in theatres May 9
The successor — in ambition, if not exactly spirit — of both David Cronenberg’s Crash and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, the new Canadian psychological drama Sharp Corner offers a pitch-black journey of obsession viewed through two unique prisms: car accidents and real estate.
In a beautiful and secluded stretch outside of Halifax, Josh (Ben Foster) and wife Rachel (Cobie Smulders) have just bought their dream home, a sleek modernist abode with floor-to-ceiling windows that offer a panoramic view of the woods and country road out front. The night after moving in, though — after having tucked their young son Max (Will Kosovic) into bed — Josh and Rachel are christening the living room with a rare-for-them act of lovemaking when a tire suddenly crashes through the window, narrowly missing Josh’s head.
It turns out that Josh and Rachel were able to get such a great price on the house because it’s located dangerously close to a deadly curve in the road, where many inattentive drivers have spun out over the years. Soon enough, there’s a second crash. And another.
Most level-headed couples would hightail it out of there, but the accidents stir something inside Josh — who is so miserable in his anonymous middle-management job, and so pushed over at home by the more ambitious Rachel — which slowly develops into a full-blown existential crisis. Perhaps his place in the world isn’t in an office, or even with his family. Maybe he’s meant to be right here in this house, ready to save whoever inevitably crashes next.
Adapting the short story by writer and journalist Russell Wangersky, Canadian director Jason Buxton crafts a sometimes tense and sometimes unsteady character study that isn’t so much laced with dread as it is slathered with it. As Josh becomes further alienated from his family, the character reveals himself to be not so much a complex creation as he is simply too tough to swallow — an enigma wrapped in a riddle that few will be tempted to puzzle out.
Buxton has a strong eye for all the many dangers of life hiding in plain sight — not only Josh and Rachel’s isolated home, but the barely noticeable deteriorations that can corrode a marriage, or destabilize a career. And the filmmaker has assembled a tremendously effective team of collaborators to amplify Josh’s deteriorating mindset, including composer Stephen McKeon and cinematographer Guy Godfree. Production designer Jennifer Stewart even deserves an award all her own for helping create the house at the centre of the film, which was built as a model home from scratch, not dissimilar to the modernist paradise that was purpose-built for Bong’s Parasite.
Yet Sharp Corner‘s script can neither match the intensity of the environment surrounding it nor the performers seeking to wrest deeper connection to it. Foster, who has patiently developed a reputation for playing anxious men lashing out at the world that they feel is boxing them in, appears to commit his entire being to Josh. This is a character ripe for explosion, yet Foster’s voice only oscillates between room-temperature line readings and a gentle whisper that is sinister in its softness. It is a commanding performance that requires a richer world to inhabit.
Smulders has a similar problem, though Rachel feels underwritten by design — Buxton needs her to be the vaguely annoying thorn in Josh’s side, dialling up his unhappiness until it consumes him, unfairly and unreasonably. That said, I wouldn’t say no to an entirely separate film depicting the events entirely from Rachel’s perspective, so strong are Smulders’s too-brief moments.
Sharp Corner ends on a sick punchline — though it is a gag that Buxton has been workshopping hard for the entire film up till that point. It is clear that Foster gets it, and he drives the moment home perfectly. Less certain is if everyone else will be so strapped in.
