Black Bear

Directed by Lawrence Michael Levine

Running time: 1hr44 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Christopher Abbott and Sarah Gadon star in Black Bear

Come, gentle viewer and take a trip to a house in the woods! It’s a classic horror set up. But Black Bear isn’t about some guy chasing you with a knife, or a zombie invasion, or any species of tangible ghoul. Black Bear is a film nightmarishly adept at capturing one of the least comfortable realisations it is possible to have while socialising: that spiralling, sinking sensation that you have been pulled unwittingly into somebody else’s cartoonishly brittle nest of neuroses. 

Aubrey Plaza plays a film director staying at a lovely old house in the picturesque countryside. The house is owned and occupied by a couple trying on B&B style hosting for size, and it becomes pretty clear, pretty early on, that absolutely every single verbal exchange or loaded question is booby-trapped, Plaza’s every response destined to be refracted back through the prism of her hosts’ ego and insecurity. And just as a classic haunted house will choose to haunt most intensely those with the most accommodating psychic energy, Plaza’s casually destructive character acts as a magnifier for every insecurity these people sling her way, prodding and playing and amplifying. 

Plaza’s performance has attracted rave notices, quite rightly, but Sarah Gadon and Christopher Abbott are equally excellent; it’s a brilliantly cast film. The War Of The Roses (1981) gave us a splendidly vicious married couple trapped in a toxic hate spiral, and this is the exquisitely calibrated hip millennial threesome equivalent. 

And then there’s the second act. Let’s not spoil things, but this really is a game of two halves.

BLACK BEAR (2020) Written by Lawrence Michael Levine | Shot by Robert Leitzell | Edited by Matthew L. Weiss

Available to watch on Google Play, Prime and other online platforms.