Review of Woodshock (2017) by Aceshop3 — 28 Sep 2017

If one thinks of the avant-garde cinema, the inscrutable Last Year at Marienbad, one can get a good sense of this film and the somewhat-baffling critical response to it. Woodshock features a beautiful performance by Kirsten Dunst, a departure—not really much like Melancholia at all, actually—from any other role where she demonstrates the deep, internal layers of grief and guilt, addiction and self-harm.

These film-makers are immersive: they give you Theresa who much like most people does not articulate herself well but is spiraling in the wake of assisting in her mother's suicide and causing an accidental death in the subsequent mourning she finds herself in.

The details matter because...life is like that. There is repetition to the daily mundanities because our lives while sober—let alone when combined with cannabinoids—are inscrutable to anybody else after we experience tremendous loss.

Dunst's performance is sublime: Theresa is less sympathetic than you might think, but it's clear that she tries her best, empathizes even as she can't help making mistakes. Her overwhelming grief adds guilt with each passing day, as the days meld into each other and Theresa can't help but languorously sleep and wake dazedly through life.

Ultimately, grief is dangerous, too, and Theresa, while shutting out anybody who asks how she is, wishes to harm herself and the things around her even as she feels a tremendous amount of emotion and connection with nature.

If the parallel isn't always clear, it's because life is like that. Woodshock is a stylized avant-garde film with an allure that will appeal only to those who wish to see the ambivalence and tragedy both in the mundane and in the violently important.

I suspect this movie was intended to be a work of art that everyone will interpret differently, so it's hard to tell you how you should feel about Theresa. But films like that should be celebrated not panned because of a failure to understand.

If you accept the mundane ambiguity of your own life on a daily basis, you should have no trouble accepting the inherent beauty in capturing that on film. If for nothing else, watch it for Dunst: an actress at the top of her game exploring the aftermath of tremendous loss and her shifting psyche.