Directed by Maxime Giroux | Written by Patrick Whistler | 96 min | ▲▲1/2
I’m not the first to say it, but Maika Monroe should be a bigger star. She brings a rarely felt authenticity to every role she chooses, from The Guest and It Follows to Longlegs — that’s certainly the case here where her performance, and those of a number of the cast around her, is often stronger than the material.
In Cold Light is a grimy little thriller with western notes, many of those provided by the dusty Ponoka, AB, locations, with concrete Calgary bringing the brutalism. Monroe is Ava Bly, just out of prison after a stint on drug charges, and she runs with a rough crowd — her family. Twin brother Tom (Jesse Irving) is hip deep in the drug trade and has a baby daughter that he’s been keeping secret from their veteran rodeo rider father, Will (Troy Kotsur), who’s still nursing resentment about the role Ava played in the accidental death of her mother years before.
The set-up here is intriguing, with a lot of pain weighing everyone down. The film mines an indie drama element underneath its genre tropes, which is to the filmmakers’ credit. Unfortunately, when characters do express themselves they too often say the most obvious things, exactly what’s on their mind, a real shame with performers of this calibre — they can deliver a world of emotion with their faces if the filmmakers would trust them to carry the story without the clunky dialogue, Monroe most of all.
At the start of the second act a key character is killed and Ava is implicated, on the run from a dirty cop (a cast-against-type Allan Hawco) with her baby niece in her arms. Here’s where the indie drama set-up starts to work against the suspense elements — too much hand-held camera is a fun killer, and a car chase is accomplished with sweaty close-ups instead of shooting outside and around the vehicles making for a confusing and even annoying sequence. The moments of action that follow are no more coherent. I figure this was shot on a shoestring, like so much Canadian cinema, with the bulk of the financing going to draw the actors — including a half-interesting, half-perplexing one-scene cameo from Helen Hunt.
The moody score by Philippe Brault does a lot of heavy lifting to keep us engaged, and Giroux knows well enough to get Monroe front and centre in key moments, her heavy lidded eyes carrying an anger and vulnerability that’s impossible to look away from.
All things considered, the simple existence of this movie is a rarity in this country — the Canadian thriller — meaning it deserves a look by genre fans, especially as its flaws, though numerous, are hardly fatal.
