Krisha Fairchild, the writer/director’s aunt, stars in this family affair.
At least The Lost Weekend spread the misery out over a few days. The harrowing Krisha takes a concentrated, unflinching look at the damage an alcoholic/addict inflicts over the course of a single Thanksgiving Day celebration. This very good domestic drama, which runs a short 85 minutes, is the assured feature debut of Trey Edward Shults, who directed, wrote, produced and edited. He also does some fine, mournful acting in a critical role.
Krisha is a family affair, story-wise and production-wise. The title character is played by Shults’ aunt, Krisha Fairchild. Also appearing are his mother, Robyn Fairchild, and grandmother, Billie Fairchild. The casting strategy favorably recalls Girls creator Lena Dunham’s pleasing indie feature Tiny Furniture, which stars members of her family and raises similar questions about the line between fiction and autobiography.
In a coup of location scouting, Krisha was shot in the home of Shults’ parents, an enormous McMansion that apparently is somewhere deep in the heart of suburban Texas. With its sprawling kitchen and soaring, two-story great room, the house perfectly conveys the comfortable, upper-middle-class milieu in which this sad story unfolds.
The film begins outside the house, on a quiet residential street crowded with cars parked for holiday gatherings. In a single, long, remarkable take — one of several — Krisha, a woman in her 60s who favors sandals and flowing skirts, pulls a suitcase behind her as she wanders from house to house. She steps in mud and curses bitterly. When she finds the right house, she is welcomed by multiple generations of a large, boisterous family. The greetings are warm, but there is a palpable undercurrent of wariness.
This scene is disorienting, as is much that follows. Shults is artfully sparing in the way he discloses information about how these people are related. I won’t say more than that about the family ties, because an important aspect of watching Krisha is figuring out who is who.
Krisha has tasked herself with preparing dishes for the Thanksgiving dinner, including a comically enormous turkey. She complicates the job by sneaking off, as addicts do, to take prescription drugs and guzzle wine from the bottle. As she gets increasingly loaded, family members confront her about her devastating past mistakes and the effects they’ve had on her loved ones.
Krisha is an accomplished film, but I have a quibble, one relating to a technical choice. Late in the film, Shults switches the aspect ratio from wide to narrow — in order, he notes in the press kit, “to give an effect of the walls closing in on Krisha.” The effect is subtle, but I mainly found it distracting. In commercial cinema, this sort of shift is perhaps best made as a bold effect, not an understated one, like the amazing moment at the beginning of This Is Cinerama when the frame opens up from Academy format to glorious widescreen. In Krisha, the change looks like artiness for artiness’ sake.
