Thank heaven Michelle Pfeiffer is back. Her turn in mother! was great, but this is an even better example of her powerful ability to act. Odd how, before her brief break from the screen, so few of her performances exhibited her profound craft. Hopefully she can now get the quality roles she deserves.
In a thankless, notably glamour-less movie, Pfeiffer shines as Kyra, a woman in her late-middle life struggling to survive in Brooklyn. That's it. That's the movie. Her ailing mother -- for whom she cares and on whom she entirely depends -- dies early in the film. She spends the final 80 or so minutes of its running time attempting to make ends meet. She can no longer cash her mother's disability checks; she's been jobless for two (?) years and can't land a new job.
The director and cinematographer create an arrestingly desperate world around Kyra, rich with darkness and entirely stripped of any romantic crap that so often ruins these movies in which celebrities fictitiously battle poverty or homelessness. Here the world is quiet and cruel, and we struggle with Kyra as she navigates fear and need in a doomed spiral downwards. One brief spark of hope is embodied in her neighbor Doug (Kiefer Sutherland), whose attraction seems born of a shared loneliness. They know a happy ending is out of the picture, but we hope along with them -- however briefly -- that they might escape some of their world-weariness and have some kind of comfort in each other. Spoiler alert: They do not.
Most interesting to me in this film is not its beak aesthetic, its sparse and haunting story, nor even Pfeiffer's amazingly nuanced performance; it's that the film often feels less like a drama and more like a thriller. It moves slowly, glacially, digging its icy grip into the viewer, but the nocturnal color palette pairs wickedly with a voyeuristic camera, chopped effectively into some hard-hitting editorial beats that make you feel that you are trespassing into a story you shouldn't be seeing.
A few moments of enigmatic images scattered throughout the film depict the figure of Ruth (Kyra's aged mother) still walking around Brooklyn with her cane, bundled up in so many layers she looks like a cartoon character. In these strange moments, with extreme closeups of her feet, hand on cane, sunglasses under a wide-brimmed hat, the visuals are accompanied by shrieking strings in dissonant harmony; it sounds like musical parts of Psycho have been lifted and dropped into the gutter.
Though the film may not force you to the edge of your seat, these scenes had me shrinking into mine. How can Ruth be wandering around? She's dead! I wondered may times if this was in fact a horror movie, and if I had been misled by genre trappings. And while this may not be a horror movie, it is certainly shot like one, and it's not until about halfway through the picture that we learn the truth: Kyra has been dressing up as her mother to cash her checks. Her fraudulent activities will soon catch up with her, no doubt, and so the film's remainder does not explore that process so much as Kyra's psychological unraveling as the inevitable catches up to her.
It's a gamble of a movie and nothing pleasant to view, but Where is Kyra? is a magnificent portrayal of life on the fringes of society, of art on the fringes of our cultural awareness, of a genius in the golden age of her craft, and of a film that shits on genre conventions and forces something truly new on us.
IMDb: Where is Kyra?
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