A young woman (Karen Sillas) invites a work colleague (Tom Noonan) over to her apartment for dinner.
As this first date progresses, the pair become intimate in a way neither intended…
I wish I had seen this movie sooner.
Although its impact might not have felt so… cellular
I first heard about it in a book, Fast, Cheap and Under Control - a chapter devoted to its production.
The production history was fascinating, but I felt no desire to check the movie out.
That was 15 years ago.
Long enough to age into the perfect mindset for viewing.
Back then, I was reading the book while trying to convert a short play I had written into a short film.
Maybe the movie would not have worked on me back then.
This is a movie for people with mileage. Scars. Regrets and fading dreams.Set entirely in the lead character’s apartment.
The first half of the film is an awkward meeting of opposites.
One feels for Jackie as she finds every attempt to connect with Noonan’s Michael is repelled.
The miscommunication is near-constant, yet the characters’ sense of loneliness only becomes more and more explicit as the night progresses.
Michael declares he would not have come if he knew it was a first date, butif this is the case, why is he at this colleague’s apartment? Why does he kiss her?
It feels more like an attempt to reclaim control.
This is a character obsessed with creating narratives and justifications for every aspect of his life.
Noonan’s presence - usually hulking and used for menace in the likes of Manhunter and RoboCop 2 - creates an ambiguity and a tension that was perhaps not intended.
It is a testament to the film, and Sillas’s astonishing performance, that he is not the most unsettling element of the film.
She is open and vulnerable at the beginning.
By the midway point, both characters seem to switch posture.
Suddenly it is Sillas who seems to be the unknown quantity - she becomes remote, alien.
For the first half of the movie, it is an awkward comedy of manners - each character at cross-purposes.
And then Sillas reveals she writes stories…
For the next 10 minutes, we watch the character read one of them.
Moving from awkward and exposition-heavy to something more nightmarish and disturbing, this oratory sounds incredibly un-cinematic.
A tale of incest and cannibalism, it is an increasingly deranged tale that removes the film from the stagy but conventional farce it initially appears to be.
It also tears the movie away from Michael’s own self-absorbed narratives.
Is this woman speaking of some deeper, personal truth? Expressing a dark urge?
The filmmaking language changes:
Suddenly the frame is filled with the character’s faces, in heavy chiaroscuro.
The colour palette changes, to include deep purples and pinks. Noonan is surrounded by a collection of dolls. It looks like something out of a Mario Bava horror movie.
Somehow, it works,
After this heightened interlude, the movie then turns into something more spare and unflinching.
Suddenly there is no miscommunication and no hidden motives. Jackie is the one on the offensive, puncturing Michael’s bubble and forcing him to truly show who he really is.
Haunting, darkly humorous and deeply human, What Happened Was… is fantastic.
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