Black Bear (2020)

 Score: 4 / 5

Aubrey Plaza sits on a bleak dock in a red bathing suit, staring out across the calm and foggy expanse, before picking up her towel and going into a lake house behind her. She sits in a wooden corner table, opens a notebook, and begins to write. She will do this four times over the course of this movie, almost shot-for-shot. Each time, it means something a bit different, and each time, it indicates the start of a new arc of the movie. The first is our only introduction. We learn soon enough that her name is Allison, and that she's a filmmaker, though the exact truth of that becomes a bit complex as we progress through the film.

Moving briefly back in time, we see Allison arrive at the remote lake house, escorted in by handsome and flirtatious Gabe (Christopher Abbott), to seek inspiration for her next film. She discusses her past as an actress and her current work as a writer and director; he seems a little too interested, especially once we discover that Gabe's romantic partner Blair (Sarah Gadon) is also present at the lake house. The couple is clearly unhappy, with Gabe embarking on misogynistic rants and praising traditional gender roles even as he can barely support them after a failed music career, and Blair drinking consistently despite her pregnancy. Gabe not-quite-deftly handles the disastrous evening of arguments and explosive emotions, but after Blair falls asleep he and Allison go for a nighttime swim and have sex.

In an odd way, this series of events -- making up roughly the first half of the movie -- reminded me a lot of Malcolm & Marie, though it's in color, features an awkward as hell third wheel, and isn't nearly as didactically dense. And while Abbott and Gadon pull out the stops in their domestic squabble, Plaza owns the sequence as an enigmatic wallflower determined to leap into the fray. She's impossible to read, which Blair pointedly says at one point, to which Allison responds in chilling deadpan, "I get that all the time." Despite the wine in her system, Blair catches Allison in lie after lie, which Allison evades and deflects before ultimately owning up to, though we're never sure if her subsequent responses are true either. Lying is a game to her, perhaps some twisted way of writing or performing to get her creative juices flowing.

We're also not quite sure what's going on with her. When she's alone outside, there are hints that she might be a voyeur, a predator, with hidden designs on the couple. Her eyes linger over Gabe's body, and though it's only her first night there, she hasn't done any work yet. She hears rustles and thumps in the forest around the house and, once, sees an overturned garbage can that has been ruffled through by something large that growls. Could a bear be stalking the house? If so, it's a weird way to introduce a nature-run-amok horror movie about a killer bear. Then again, that's the title of the movie, isn't it? By the time, late in the evening, the couple drunkenly fights and Blair is injured by Gabe, Allison is tasked with driving them to the hospital. Suddenly a bear appears in the road and she crashes into a tree.

Suddenly the sequence ends, and onscreen text declares that part two has begun. The film essentially resets, and the same characters are reintroduced to the same location but in a wildly different situation. Gabe is actually the director of a film -- apparently the first part was the film he was shooting -- about marital infidelity and the artist's creative process. He's leading a small independent team of technicians and makeup artists and, of course three actors: a loose stand-in for himself (Alexander Koch), Allison, and Blair. But now Allison is Gabe's wife who just wants to be a talented star and Blair is the pretty new thing with eyes for the director. As the curtains lift and we see behind the scenes, their characters continue to grapple and fight with the same issues: Gabe is pretending to have an affair with Blair to provoke Allison's performance, but he might actually be having the affair, too. Allison is now the drunken, jilted lover obsessing over her artistry and her failing marriage.

It's all more than a little crazy, and it's hard to make interesting as prose. I won't say more about the plot, though I've pretty much outlined it here, because it doesn't really matter. What you think you know, you don't, and by the time the film flips on its head, I'm not sure the plot really matters any more. Kind of like in real life; what really matters is the art, while real life is too sordid to map out and make sense of. The film's keen resemblance, in this way, to Birdman is key: it's about life imitating art, or perhaps art imitating life, or perhaps the interactions between those two impulses. Performing is lying, as is the fiction these artists create, and the levels of comedy inherent in these absurd people doing terrible things to each other in the name of art belie a deeply disturbing meta-commentary on the state of the art.

The film feels like a horror film -- though it's not in the least scary, at least conventionally -- mostly thanks to its droning score and dark color palette in an isolated, claustrophobic environment. Plaza's unhinged performance pairs really well with both Abbott and Gadon's, who work really hard to keep their facades civilized and hospitable. So why the formal horror techniques? My guess is to highlight the emotional and psychological violence these characters are enacting on each other; if they were given knives they could hardly do more damage. And when you consider that the whole film (or perhaps only parts of it?) only takes place in Allison's mind, you wonder if any of it is so much discarded drafts or only an imaginative way to break writer's block. And it helps that Plaza's performance gives so much unreadable depth to everything Alllison says or does. She's constantly devastated in this movie, even as seemingly different characters, but where in one scene she is clearly in manipulative control, in the next she is crying into the void and desperate for salvation. Meanwhile, her co-stars go from thanklessly brutal domestics to wickedly gleeful artists mocking Allison as she crumbles beneath them. 

And then, of course, there's the bear itself. I don't want to spoil it for you, because there is one particular bit of dialogue near the end that uses the bear to name what should be an obvious symbol. But it caught me fully by surprise, and I'm still not sure what's going on there. Is the bear real? Is it imaginary? Does it represent a certain person? All are possible, and none are certain. It reminded me more than a little of Denis Villeneuve's 2013 masterpiece Enemy and its spiders. I have a suspicion, but it would take at least another viewing to flesh out. I'd rather revel in the multiple possibilities presented by this film and consider the implications of creating art at the expense of the people around you. That's some scary stuff.