Sharp Corner

Grade: A-

One of the things I admire about Sharp Corner is the way it subverts so many expectations. If I hadn’t already known the plot and genre, I’d have frequently thought it was going in one particular direction in any given scene, only to be wrong. Some early moments are set up like we might be in for a horror jump scare, but it doesn’t go there. It’s a slow-burning, thrilling character study with a story so rich that it feels broader than the movie it’s boxed into. We can sense that they have lives in the unseen action before the first frame, the scenes we don’t see, and the ones we won’t see because they exist beyond the end credits.

A fellow critic likened it to a Paul Schrader type of character study. I thought of Michael Douglas in Falling Down, as well as Charlize Theron in Young Adult. Sharp Corner has Ben Foster starring as the husband/father of a family of three. As his priorities become skewed and an unnatural obsession takes over, he bumps along through life in denial. “My family’s doing great. We’re turning a corner. We’re gonna get through this. I got this. This is an easy fix.” Is it? Really?

Foster is Josh, who has moved with his wife Rachel (Cobie Smulders – Robin from How I Met Your Mother, and Maria Hill from the MCU) and young son Max (William Kosovic) to a home in the country. Rachel works as a therapist, and Josh is trying to adapt after having just been passed over for a promotion, in favor of a young up-and-comer that Josh trained. The house seems perfect at first, but they soon find out why it was suspiciously on the market for so long. It’s right off a back road that has a sharp corner with limited visability during the day in the best of weather. On their first night there, a vicious crash in their front yard sends a tire through their window at a most inconvenient time for Josh and Rachel. The driver didn’t make it.

This sends Josh into an obsessive rabbit hole, as he mentally drifts away from work and family, to become increasingly preoccupied with what he can do to save lives if this happens again (and it does, several times). There’s a chilling scene where he crashes the funeral of one of these people, making up a different name when he introduces himself, and lying about how he knew the man. The warning sign off the road is obscured by some shrubbery. He takes a chainsaw to those plants. He takes a CPR class. He buys tools, a first aid kit, and one of those dummies to practice on. (One of the biggest laughs comes when Rachel, oblivious to all of this, finds it in the closet and appears to mistake it for a different kind of doll.)

There never seems to be a car crash when Josh is sitting outside, waiting with intense focus. It eventually gets to a point where he doesn’t want an accident to not happen. He wants one to happen so he can swoop in and save the day. Sharp Corner is the kind of movie that may give you the desire to watch it again, or at least the first half, to see if there’s a progression with the actors’ characterizations, or if the people they’re playing were always that way. It’s a thriller that made me think of Panic and Lakeview Terrace – two of my favorites from the 2000-09 decade. Like this one, both feature mundane, suburban characters who find themselves in a situation with slow-building uncomfortableness. The kind that would make you yell at the screen when they start to do something.

What we think will happen in the climax does, but not in any predictable Hollywood fashion. Some may think it ends abruptly, with so much to think about as far as what happens next. That may be the case, but either way, Sharp Corner was always going to be a movie that feels as if much took place before and lots will happen later. It’s not in a box where anything worth seeing is what we get. Josh becomes unhinged based on what happens in the plot, but the viewer gets the sense that he was like that before. Something would have come along.

Grade: A-