Movie Review: Braid

Braid *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Mitzi Peirone.

Written by: Mitzi Peirone.

Starring: Madeline Brewer (Daphne Peters / Mother), Imogen Waterhouse (Petula Thames / Doctor), Sarah Hay (Tilda Darlings / Daughter), Scott Cohen (Detective Siegel), Brad Calcaterra (Tiresias The Omniscient Homeless Man), Zoe Feigelson (Young Daphne), Dhoni Middleton (Young Petula), Tai Lyn Sandhu (Young Tilda), Charles Techman (Grandfather), Mary Looram (Grandmother), David McDonald (Doctor), Chris Roe (Officer Moore), Derrick Williams (Officer Bogart), Mauricio Ovalle (Officer Harrison), Jill Dalton (Old Daphne), Nancy Ozelli (Old Petula), Ethel Fisher (Old Tilda).

 

There are times when you watch a filmmaker’s debut film that you can tell a great filmmaker is somewhere inside this film, even if they haven’t quite cracked the code yet on making a great film. Mitzi Peirone’s Braid is such a film. This is an original, disturbing, horrifying, darkly comic film in which as a filmmaker Peirone pretty much just throws everything at the wall to see what will stick – and amazingly, discovers a hell of a lot of it does. I don’t think she has quite cracked the narrative or the characters in the film – the film almost doesn’t have a narrative to speak of, and the characters are wafer thin. And yet, Braid is such an original jolt, you pretty much don’t care. While I don’t think Braid is a great film – I do think it is the work of a potentially great filmmaker – I cannot wait to see what she does next.

 

The narrative, such as there is, involves two drug users/dealers Petula (Imogen Waterhouse) and Tilda (Sarah Hay) who lose $80,000 worth of drugs that belong to some dangerous people, and need to come up with the money – fast – to pay them back. Their only hope is visiting their childhood friend Daphne (Madeline Brewer) – an eccentric (to put is nicely) woman who lives alone in her big house, spending her inheritance money. There are many problems with this – the biggest one being that Daphne insists on the three of them playing the same demented game they did as children – where Daphne plays the mother, Tilda plays the daughter, and Petula the doctor who arrives to check on them. This larger game gives way to smaller demented games inside the game. The games have rules no unlike Fight Club – the most important being that no one leaves and no outsiders allowed. This is an insular game, that requires the players to be cut off from the world outside.

 

To say more would be to spoil the “fun” of what of what follows, although of course fun is not really the correct world. This is a deeply messed up movie, full of deeply messed up stuff. The characters play with each other in all sorts of ways, and delight in tormenting each other – often psychologically, but at times in horrific physical ways as well. Perhaps if you were to watch the film again, it would make things in the narrative clearer – but I almost prefer it this way. Peirone has crafted a very strange film, and filled it with very strange visual and scenes. There is never a moment where you don’t feel like you’re in the hands of someone who knows precisely what they are doing.

 

And yet, there is something lacking here. The characters in the movie aren’t really characters at all. The two drug dealers are interchangeable right up until they are not. And the crazy woman in the house by herself is crazy from the start, and just keeps going more insane. As it moves along. Great filmmakers who may make something like Braid – like perhaps David Lynch at his best – find a way to put all this demented stuff on screen, but also to make us care about what happens. David Lynch is a godlike creator in the films he makes – but he loves his characters. You don’t get that feeling in Braid as much as you get the feeling that Peirone is delighting in tormenting them.

 

Still, there is so much originality on display in Braid that it seems petty to complain too much. This is Peirone’s first film after all – and in its own way it is remarkable. I certainly feel that in 20 years, we could look back at Braid as the starting point of a brilliant career.