Jason Buxton’s “Sharp Corner” is odd and unsettling, fraught with intimate anxieties. The setup is nearly surreal, with married couple Josh (Ben Foster) and Rachel (Cobie Smulders) having sex in their new house when the tire of a car crashes through their living room window. They or their young son, Max (William Kosovic), could’ve easily been killed. Looking outside, they see the wreckage of an auto collision smoldering in their yard. Josh and Rachel live right on a road, which, we soon learn, takes a sharp turn that causes frequent accidents. No wonder they got the place for a song.
The “tire through the window” bit is the film’s signature sequence, at once irrational and creepily plausible. Buxton toes that line throughout “Sharp Corner,” a cunning thriller that nudges at how calamities and small disappointments alike can alter our lives. Buxton exploits how easily boundaries can be trespassed and how flimsy our conceptions of accomplishment are. This isn’t new stuff for a movie, but Buxton sustains a masterful sense of dread, informing these ironies with existential undertow.
Fissures are visible in Josh and Rachel’s marriage before the intrusion of the tire and the seemingly endless car accidents that follow it, as Buxton, who also adapted the screenplay from a short story by Russell Wangersky, skillfully juggles various signifiers. Josh kept at the wine long after Rachel had moved on. Their sex is prefaced with a subtle acknowledgement that this sort of thing hasn’t happened in a while. Rachel’s suggestions about how to renovate the house clearly annoy Josh, and so on.
Anyone who has been in a long-term adult relationship will recognize these moments, and yet there’s a heightened chill here, as those sculpted long takes and precise yet seemingly casual compositions don’t give us anywhere to hide. The accidents in the yard steer the tension of this marriage into a ruthlessly believable nightmare realm.
Buxton and the actors allow details to continually accumulate. Rachel is an elegant, rational woman, while Josh is a dweeb with a gut and thinning hair and dorky clothes who is stuck in his head, nursing private resentments. Visually, you might wonder why these two are together, and the clash of their personalities does little to dispel the mystery. You look at them and imagine Rachel venting to friends.
The swagger of other Ben Foster characters—the outlaws in “3:10 to Yuma” and “Hell or High Water” for instance—is turned down to a simmer in Josh. As he illustrated in “Leave No Trace,” Foster is a showboat who can turbocharge internalized roles when the situation demands. When showboats dial themselves back, though, you can often feel the effort in their self-control, which can give their everyman roles an unusual tension. You can feel in both Foster and Josh the desire to run wild. Foster paints a portrait of the dislocation and sense of pointlessness that animates many modern men.
Josh is understood to be an intelligent person who hasn’t found his niche; he’s a square among circles. In addition to the wife who seems to make no sense with him, Josh is surrounded by good-looking and successful men, including the guy who usurped him for a promotion at work. This house was supposed to be a win for Josh, and yet it inadvertently underscores his gullibility as an ineffectual provider, forcing a reckoning that redefines a tortured domestic situation.
None of this free-floating anxiety is voiced—if it was “Sharp Corner” might not work. Buxton submerges these associations to subtext, orchestrating our curiosity as to how severe this situation is going to get, following Josh step by step into a kind of organized madness that’s contrasted against the everyday settings and lucid imagery.
The stark and seemingly straightforward imagery begins to feel uncanny, and the film comes to suggest the missing link between J.G. Ballard and Raymond Carver’s respective stories of alienation. Look at anything banal for long enough and the mind can render it strange and otherworldly. Everything surrounding Josh is crisp and clean and clear and rational and yet something seems… wrong. The frequency of the car accidents feels supernatural, though Buxton never goes over-the-top.
The crashes just seem to happen, growing more frequent and apocalyptic in sync with Josh’s clouding psyche. The sharp corner comes to resemble a question mark and even a portal. Another writer comes to mind: Stephen King and his novel “Pet Sematary,” which pivots on a road with tractor trailers that ruins a family. Except that Buxton doesn’t give us the relief of shuffling, rotting, above all tangible monsters.
Buxton and Foster place us so vividly in Josh’s shoes that you may want “Sharp Corner” to become an explicit horror movie as a relief from the gathering tension of what might happen. This is the relief that Josh also craves as he begins to yearn for the crashes. Many films of this sort cave and eventually offer a big climax. “Sharp Corner” never resorts to ordinary suspense calisthenics. At times, this movie suggests last year’s potent “Sleep,” without the belabored supernatural conspiracy.
The sharp corner reveals to Josh his disconnection from his family and himself and offers him a cure for his malaise, which will sound familiar to people who are hobbled and affirmed by obsession. Josh’s profound need and its attendant ugliness are revealed to his family and himself by merely a bit of road. “Sharp Corner” suggests, persuasively, that the fabric holding us and our illusions of ourselves together could be that thin.
More fragile and dislocated men feature in “Neighborhood Watch,” an agreeably low-key buddy movie and kidnapping mystery that suggests a Shane Black production played at a much lower, DIY register. That’s not a bad thing—Black’s “The Nice Guys” has sharp dialogue and damned if it doesn’t know it. “Neighborhood Watch” is shaggier and humbler and all the better for it.
As in “The Nice Guys,” both buddies here are misfits. Simon (Jack Quaid) has recently been released from a mental institution, with a still shaky idea of what’s real and what isn’t. Ed (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) seems to be more or less sane, but he’s a retired university security guard who can’t quite accept that he’s retired or that he was never a badass detective. United in delusions of greatly varying scales, Simon and Ed attempt to get to the bottom of the kidnapping of a young woman, which, given that Simon was the only witness, may have never happened.
Director Duncan Skiles and writer Sean Farley aren’t that interested in casting doubt on Simon’s reliability—this isn’t “Memento.” The case is window dressing for surprisingly strong character work. Simon and Ed’s rhyming feelings of diminished self-worth quietly inform the movie without a big deal being made. It’s a nice touch when Ed tries to run a license plate on a computer program at home and can’t complete the transaction because of insufficient funds on his card. Farley’s script has plenty of little details like that. I could’ve done without Simon’s hallucinations, as they seem piped in from a more frenetic, show-off crime movie, but they aren’t a deal breaker.
Allowed to look older here than he has in prior work, Jeffrey Dean Morgan gives an elegant and poignant performance. He’s one of those tall and rangy guys who doesn’t look quite like a movie star but who nevertheless gives middle-middle age a good name. He could play Brad Garrett’s brother in something, or maybe Frank Grillo’s. Their respective masculinities are all of a volatile, yet sensitive school. I’ve been iffy on Jack Quaid, but this role allows him more breathing room than the gimmicky thrillers he’s done recently. Quaid is funny and vulnerable and at least a shrewd character actor.
Most importantly, Morgan and Quaid have chemistry. The actors make the weirdness of their characters click, suggesting a kinship that could pull the characters out of a swamp of disappointment. That’s the kind of acceptance that eludes Josh of “Sharp Corner.”
“Sharp Corner” and “Neighborhood Watch” are both available to rent on various streamers.
