83 min | NR | August 4, 2023 | IFC Films
A teenage girl falls for an older man. Then her mother meets him and recognizes something she would rather forget. The film keeps hinting at a darker truth and never has the nerve to commit to it.
Beth runs a coffee shop in a small Vermont town and watches her daughter Anna fall hard for an older man named Eric. Eric is charming, attentive, and precise about what he wants. When Beth meets him, she sees something underneath the charm that she recognizes from her own past. Amy Redford builds the film around a buried secret that ties these three people together. The movie wants to be a thriller about predation and inherited damage. It mostly becomes a slow circling of a reveal it cannot decide how to deliver.
Grace Van Dien plays Anna with the raw need of a young woman who mistakes attention for love. She is convincing in the early scenes and gives Anna a hunger that explains why she ignores every warning. Summer Phoenix plays Beth as a woman holding a dam shut with both hands. Phoenix does her best work in silence, watching Eric across a room and calculating what she already knows. Kyle Gallner plays Eric with a controlled stillness that suggests menace without ever fully committing to it. The performances reach for a tension the script keeps undercutting.
Redford directs from a script by Scott Organ that mistakes withholding for suspense. The film leans on muted, overcast cinematography and a lot of close, handheld framing meant to feel intimate. The effect is airless. Conversations linger past their natural end and the editing holds on faces waiting for a weight the writing never supplies. The score nudges toward dread in scenes that have not earned it, telling the audience to feel something the story refuses to dramatize.
The central premise carries real charge. A mother seeing her daughter repeat her own worst experience is a strong engine for a thriller. Redford and Organ keep the engine idling. They tease the connection between Beth and Eric for so long that the eventual confrontation arrives drained of force. The film gestures at exploitation and trauma and then retreats into murk, unwilling to be the lurid thriller its setup demands or the serious drama its actors keep trying to play.