Nancy

For some bizarre reason, Prime classified this as a suspense/horror. This description is reinforced by the movie thumbnail depicting the main character as a sort of Jekyll/Hyde split personality. This was the reason I decided to watch it.

This movie is a quiet drama about lonliness and desperation. The titular character lives in a drab small town with an ailing, unthankful and abrasive mother that she is forced to care for. She escapes this misery via social media which leads her to create real-world vicarious experiences to try to connect emotionally with outside people.

There's no action... no sinister motives... no dramatic music... no shouted dialogue... no histrionics... Every character we meet in this movie is hurting inside and trying to relieve that pain via human connection.

There a couple of recognizable actors, but the main actress Andrea Riseborough -- whom I'd never heard of -- is the surprise. IMDB tells me she is an English actress(!) who has been nominated for an Oscar. Though she rarely talks above a murmur and has little to do physically, she effectively conveys the bleakness of her character's unhappy existence.

I enjoyed it because I've reached an age where I can relate in some way to each person in the movie. If you can't relate to it, consider yourself lucky.

It's the emotional ambiguity of the final scene that has me wrestling with a rating for this movie. Depending on your dispostion you'll find it either cynical or uplifting.

Is no one going to ask about the effing wig? I mean it's the main character, the riddle, the subplot. No one addresses it? The Wig wasn't even in the credits. Dang, they did wig wrong.

It's a quiet flick. Very unhollywood and I did like how the story was fairly interesting without resulting in the usually Hollywood tricks like slap stick or melodrama At the same time the movie feels like a baseball game with a team trying to get on base and score versus going for the home run. I felt that the acting talent was not fully used to their full capability because I just did not feel the full impact of the story. It just falls short. Did hold the same quality as say Slow West, which I felt was a quiet movie that does hit you hard. Very bland.

The acting is spot-on, but this quiet film leaves much to be desired. The word anticlimax comes to mind.

Other reviewers describe this as a sad film, some going as far as to label it "misery porn." I could have accepted some misery porn. But once you've seen The Swerve starring the Incomparable Azura Skye, the bar for something to be called misery porn becomes so much higher than Nancy reaches. Nancy is far from a feel-good film, but it's also a long way from the opposite thereof. It is sad, and quiet, and I expect to be forgetting it within days.

This indie is an intriguing and haunting psychological "thriller", but not a thriller in the ordinary use of the term. There's just a constant air of melancholic uncertainty, so you just don't know which way the film is going to go.

The most talented Andrea Riseborough gives a terrific performance here as the introverted and depressive Nancy who's possibly a victim of abuse. She's been taking care of her ailing and carping mother (Ann Dowd), who has Parkinson's. Nancy is an aspiring writer, suffering through many rejection letters from publishers, while trying to earn money in temp jobs.

When her mother passes from a stroke, Nancy sees a TV news story about the 30th anniversary of the disappearance of a 5-year-old girl from a shopping mall. When see sees an age progression picture of what the girl would look like today, it bears a striking resemblance to her. Add to that, the fact that Nancy cannot find her birth certificate in any files at home.

She calls the parents of the missing girl and sets up a meeting with them, after sending them a photo of herself on her cell phone. The father (Steve Buscemi) is a psychologist and skeptical whether Nancy is their daughter, while the mother (J. Smith Cameron) is more accepting and open to the possibility. Both Buscemi and Smith Cameron are superb in their roles here.

I won't go into more details or write spoilers, but I'll say I was very engrossed as to which way this movie was going to go.

Overall, not the easiest film to watch because of its constant melancholic tone, but the fine acting from a most solid cast and its suspenseful atmospherics drew me in and kept me there. An excellent feature film debut from Christina Choe, who wrote and directed the indie.