Directed by Jason Buxton | Written by Buxton, adapting a short story by Russell Wangersky | 110 min | ▲▲▲1/2
An earlier version of this review ran in September 2024 during coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival.
What’s likely to be this year’s most high-profile Nova Scotian-made feature, courtesy of a national distribution deal through Elevation Films, Sharp Corner has arrived in cinemas for those who didn’t see it during its festival run last year. I watched it for the second time this week, and was struck again by how unusual a film it is. It has a distinctly Stephen King vibe, without being a supernatural horror — it’s a foreboding character study and a psychological thriller shot, mostly, in Terence Bay.
Ben Foster and Cobie Smulders are a nice, normal middle aged couple, Josh and Rachel, who move with their six-year-old son, Max (William Kosovic), into a lovely home on the titular sharp corner out in the sticks. The night they move in a drunken teen wraps his car around a tree in their front yard, sending a wheel through their living-room window. Josh starts to develop an unhealthy obsession with the the unfortunate and frequent crashes out front. Josh’s motivations are the fuel for this singular picture — why is he so compelled by the horror, to the point of alienating his wife?
At an early screening this week, Buxton suggested Josh lives an unexamined life, which is why we struggle to understand whether he’s deeply self-deluded, whether he’s a pathological liar, or maybe both. Foster creates a fully rounded character that we get to watch slip into a dark hole he’s dug for himself — he projects a version of masculinity rarely seen in a lead where the film isn’t a comedy, a milquetoast middle manager with an unironic ‘stache, desperately unlikeable and fundamentally insecure yet driven by inchoate need to be something more than he is, despite seeming to have a fully realized life — family, friends, a decent living, and now the big house. His spiral makes you wonder what the glamorous Rachel ever saw in this guy, or maybe what she saw before his inarticulate misery.
As we go on this journey, the Stephen McKeon score, the Guy Godfree camerawork the Jorge Weisz editing, and Buxton’s unwillingness to spoon-feed easy answers propels Sharp Corner into true thriller territory. At its core is a man who might actually get to live out a perverse fantasy of what he wants to be while he denies what he is, which would clearly be the worst thing for him — and for everyone else around him. Chilling and sadly relevant.
