by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Trine Dyrholm, Tim Roth
Intro:
... a tough watch but a surprisingly rewarding one.
A thing that needs to be said, but entirely out of the grasp of the people who need to say it. That point where a person’s empathy exceeds their articulation, and the void of dead air between two people feels like the worst thing that can exist.
Poison, the directorial debut for actress [and former Eurovision host] Désirée Nosbusch, is adapted from a play, and it shows. The majority of the story takes place at a cemetery, where the son of Lucas (Tim Roth) and Edith (Trine Dyrholm) was buried ten years earlier, and these scenes primarily involve the two lashing out at each other. As duelling expressions of grief, with Lucas emotionally withdrawn and Edith letting it all ring out, the intense and pervasive discomfort is palpable. But there are only so many ways to make a character say something, have another leave out of disgust, and then promptly return to continue the conversation.
As much as Lucas and Edith let their emotions get the better of them, they both come from a horrifyingly grounded place. Lucas basically embodies the sentiment shared by Nick Cave in One More Time with Feeling – the romanticisation of tragedy as artistic inspiration doesn’t match its silencing effect. While Edith sees any expression other than grief as desecrating the memory of the dead. It happened, it must be sat with, end of story.
The stringiness of Lot Vekemans’ scripting (adapting his own play of the same name) adds to the visceral effect of the dialogue.
Poison is a tough watch but a surprisingly rewarding one. Roth and Dyrholm do justice to the theatrical material, while Nosbusch and Vekemans manage to work past the cyclical plot in a way that shows they have equally interesting approaches to storytelling.
