100 min | NR | October 1, 2021 | Magnolia Pictures
Ana escapes her grim life through a radio and lands in a dreamworld where women lure soldiers to their deaths. It wants to be a feminist war fantasy with teeth. It settles for a beautiful postcard.
Ana wants to die. A radio crackles, a tunnel opens, and she crosses into a coastal limbo where a crew of women lure soldiers to their deaths with distress calls. Karen Cinorre builds her debut as a war fantasy where the women hold the weapons and the men sail in to drown. The premise reads as a feminist revenge dream. The film is really about whether killing the people who hurt you is liberation or just another machine that runs on bodies, and it never decides.
Grace Van Patten plays Ana with a flat, watchful affect that suits a woman sleepwalking through her own escape. She holds back when the film needs her to break, and the central arc stays muffled. Mia Goth plays Marsha as the true believer who recruits Ana into the killing, and Goth gives the role a coiled menace that the script keeps interrupting. Soko and Havana Rose Liu fill out the crew as Gert and Bea with more texture than the writing earns them. Juliette Lewis drifts through as June, a submarine oracle who speaks in riddles and never connects to anything around her.
Cinorre writes and directs, and her strongest instrument is the image. The cinematography turns the seaside hideout into a saturated postcard, all golden light and pin-up costuming, and the surface beauty deliberately fights the violence underneath. The editing favors tableau over momentum. Scenes pose and dissolve before they build, so the film plays as a series of arranged pictures rather than a story with pressure. The needle drops and choreographed set pieces announce their own cleverness, and the design swallows the stakes.
The idea at the center is real. A woman offered the chance to become the thing that destroyed her, and asked whether she wants it. Cinorre frames that question in striking compositions and then refuses to dramatize it. The polemic stays airless because the film mistakes a mood for an argument. There is a sharp, dangerous movie inside this one. It stays trapped behind the pretty glass.