Promising Young Women: SHIVA BABYand THE CRAFT: LEGACY

Shiva Baby is so drenched in social anxiety — not to mention family obligations, professional frustrations, and sexual tension — that one could practically wring it out. The whole endeavor has a palpable feeling of discomfort, the camerawork close and ever-so-slightly trembling, the score spare stabbing strings, the dialogue surface pleasant, subtextually jabbing small talk of needling relatives gossiping and hesitant strangers networking. It takes place almost entirely at a shiva for a distant relative (someone’s second wife’s sister—that sort of thing) of our protagonist, a college senior (Rachel Sennott) whose various worlds are about to uncomfortably collide. Her future looks uncertain, graduating without good prospects, to the dismay of her mother (Polly Draper) who tells her to let the other mourners think she has interviews lined up. Her father (Fred Melamed) still pays her bills since her babysitting job is so erratically scheduled. And neither know that her alleged babysitting job is a cover story for her real meager source of income: meeting men on a sugar daddy app and getting some easy money for a good time. We start the movie at the end of her latest hookup with an older man (Danny Deferrari), the better to recognize him when he enters the house. Small world. His wife (Dianna Agron) and baby are meeting him there, too. The walls are closing in.

There’s a constant sense of teetering on the edge of potential embarrassment, and Sennott capably plays the squirm, blundering forward though her insecurities and realizing only too late each escalating cringe. The tension rises as she’s bolstered by craft that keeps her tightly framed and blocking that presses her into corners or into uncomfortable exposure. In this small gathering the rooms were already full of elderly family friends (like Jackie Hoffman) prying nicely or passive aggressively into her personal life, and her childhood best friend and first romantic partner (Molly Gordon) makes eyes at her, too. Now it's only more complicated. Writer-director Emma Seligman, in a striking debut feature, has the confidence to sustain this small, well-tuned picture — a mere 70-some minutes and just a wisp of plotting to carry it — by signaling the largely interior stakes through small gestures and flushes of discomfort. The movie’s all about eye lines and furtive glances, the cold sweat of conversational awkwardness and the tension between polite fictions and outright deceptions. All the while, the whole thing plays out like a prelude to a panic attack, emotionally edging right up to the brink of a psychological catastrophe that never quite erupts. It feels like an achingly real emotional state.

You never know where you’ll find that. For instance, I just caught up with writer-director Zoe Lister-Jones' The Craft: Legacy. Who’d have thought the couple decades belated sequel/remake of the cult teen coven classic would have some emotional truth in it? I didn’t. But there it is anyway. There’s a scene in the middle, a sort of Breakfast Club misfit confession circle, in which the star teen girls who dabble in witchcraft as a form of self-empowerment — but dangers lurk, because of course they do — talk with a former bullying boy from their school. He tearfully admits his closeted bisexuality and earnestly confesses to feeling stifled by gender norms. It’s a real bolt of interesting emotional valences that changes the temperature of the scene and resonates throughout the rest of the picture. The whole thing is an amiable teen flick, with lockers and house parties and cute montages and, befitting its horror roots, a bit of dark sinister intentions lingering underneath. There are a few good creepy moments, and fine parallel plots about our new-in-town lead girl (Cailee Spaeny) getting to know her new friends and her latent powers, and her single mother (Michelle Monaghan) finding a new beau, a masculinist self-help guru and maybe-cult-leader (David Duchovny). (Some shades of The Lost Boys, there, perhaps.)

So there’s decent contrast drawn between the girl-power witches and dark forces of misogyny, and there’s the usual stuff about crushes and classes and learning to grow into oneself inherent in the teen movie of any genre. It’s a consistent through line of inquiry connecting the boy’s troubles and the girls’, a frank admission that societal expectations can hurt everyone, even those who are theoretically built up by them. Even if the movie never quite leans all the way into horror — though there’s a bit with a figure in a mirror in a darkened bedroom that’s quite spooky — and there are fleeting moments where it feels like one of those featherlight Netflix Original buzzword Mad Libs pictures, the whole project has a consistent and pleasant earnestness about its characters that makes for a modestly enjoyable effort as it coasts to its routine conclusion.

Expect to be Treated Like a Fool No More: OBVIOUS CHILD

Amiable though it is, the indie comedy Obvious Child is nonetheless a clear political act, all the more successful for how unassuming it is. The movie follows Jenny Slate as Donna, a struggling stand-up comic living through her late-twenties in Brooklyn, navigating her relationships both personal and professional. In this story, small and sweet, writer/director Gillian Robespierre uses her directorial debut to tell a good, simple, character-driven story, and assert the basic personhood and agency of women. It’s sad to think that’s controversial in any way in 2014, but here we are and so it can be. Donna is faced with difficult circumstances in this film and arrives at a decision that’s right for her and the people around her. Robespierre deftly walks an attention-grabbing concept down an emotional and tonal tightrope, all the more effective for making her film with specificity in the writing, preserving a sense of healthy respect for a woman’s right to choose her own path.

We first meet Donna when she’s being dumped. In a state of depression she complains to her warm father (Richard Kind) and frostier mother (Polly Draper), cries on the shoulder of her earthy roommate (Gaby Hoffmann), and gets drunk with a stand-up pal (Gabe Liedman). She’s doing shots when she bumps into Max, an attractive stranger (Jake Lacy). Sparks fly. They go back to his place. They dance goofily to a Paul Simon album. They have sex. Through the fog of her hangover the next morning, she’s unsure if she wants this one-night-stand to go any farther. Over the next few weeks, they keep finding their way back into each other’s lives for tentative flirtations in scenes charmingly fluttering with romantic potential. This is all standard cutsey low-key romantic comedy stuff of the indie persuasion, but it’s enlivened by likable performances that convey a sense of specificity to these people and their lives. The movie is about the uncertainty and awkwardness of struggling to get a foothold in a creative industry and making meaningful personal connections, allowing the struggle to sweat it out on the characters’ expressions.

Into this mix comes a notable complication. Donna discovers that she’s pregnant. She decides to have an abortion, but her appointment is a few weeks away (and on Valentine’s Day, of all days). And so she doesn’t tell Max right away, a clear obstacle to figuring out whether she wants to date him. What works for handling a topic like abortion in a comedic context is the way the procedure itself is never a joke and hardly used for cheap dramatic stakes. It’s discussed. (Hoffmann has a line about old white men in black robes making decisions about women’s health that has an extra timely bite after a certain recent Supreme Court ruling.) Nor is the movie saying hers is the only valid decision a woman can make. It’s a fair, nonjudgmental film that looks generously and compassionately on its characters, weighing their feelings with a degree of care. It’s a movie that features calm, productive discussion of abortion without letting it overwhelm the whole. It features as much crude stand-up, flatulence, silly banter, and sarcasm as it does tenderly written and acted scenes of real emotional openness and welcome candor.

The screenplay (from a story by Robespierre and collaborators Karen Maine, Elisabeth Holm, and Anna Bean) sometimes stretches to fill its runtime. It has some weaker, self-absorbed patches and scene-long tangents that feel like typical debut-film bugs. It’s shot simply and modestly. But what makes the movie such an affectionate, positive experience overall is the way it makes clear in all aspects that its characters are specific people who can’t be easily reduced to stock types. Most people, men and women alike, don’t live rom-com lives that conclude happily ever after at the altar or in a delivery room. Here is a movie for people whose idea of a happy romantic comedy ending would be curling up on the couch to watch a movie. How refreshing to see a movie about romance that sweetly embraces the complications of life. In Slate’s performance is a character who is bright, driven, insecure, and struggling, manipulating her voice and mannerisms as if she’s always self-consciously performing, cutting awkwardness with a barbed comment. It’s a terrific, complicated performance in a comedy full of characters with real, convincing presences.

Obvious Child is a movie about characters who make all kinds of decisions about their lives, arriving at them honestly. It’s a film that intends not to score points, but to provoke empathy. Slate makes Donna intensely sympathetic. She may not make it as a stand-up comic. She and Max, good chemistry between the actors aside, may not have a relationship in the future. But the uncertainty of the struggle is what makes them so compelling, and the way they resolve conflicts so understandable. It finds humor in its situations out of what makes its characters tick. Take the scene where she finally confides in her mother. They have the following exchange. Donna: “I’m pregnant and I’m thinking of having an abortion.” Mom: “What a relief. I thought you were going to say you were moving to L.A.”

It’s a small movie, but it is bighearted smallness, humble, personal, funny, and quietly important. And in this particular case, about this subject, that is far more powerful than a screed would ever be. Robespierre has a made a film that’s warm and specific. It allows its characters room to find what works for them at this particular point in their lives. This isn’t a universal recommendation or a solution. It’s freedom. Would that we all could have such freedom of choice.