White Bird In A Blizzard

WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD 

Director : Gregg Araki

Year : 2015

Genre : Drama

Rating : **1/2

 

Shailene Woodley does her best to shatter the girl next door image she has carved over the past few years with a brave and truly adult performance in Gregg Araki's latest film 'White Bird In A Blizzard', a dark, bizarre and very uneven drama that tries to emulate the dramatic tone of directors such as Todd Haynes or David Lowery but instead comes across more Todd Solondz. 

The film, based on the novel by Laura Kasischke tells the story of Kat, a volatile Gen-X teenager (Woodley) who tries to overcome the mysterious disappearance of her fiery mother (Eva Green) through promiscuous sex and boundary-breaking independence. At first, her mothers absence doesn't seem to bother the callous Kat but upon returning from college to her home and her downtrodden father (Christopher Meloni), she is suddenly confronted with the fact that the disappearance has affected her in ways she didn't even fully realise at first.

Playing like a David Lynch film as filtered through the strict Hollywood system, 'White Bird In A Blizzard' has ambitions to be the next cult classic but lacks the emotional heft or strange sensibility to really stand out from the crowd of better indie fare released recently. Woodley, as always, gives a terrific central performance as the rambunctious and rebellious Kat and Eva Green is great fun to watch as her enigmatic mother but the whole tone of the movie is so melodramatic and pretentious that everything done or said in it comes across as either false or just plain weird. None of the characters feel truly developed and Araki's direction, while visually accomplished, seems laboured and somewhat uninspired.