You
probably always suspected Brooklyn hipsters were evil. This film proves it.
Unfortunately for Leah, it will do so by placing her and her unborn daughter in
dire jeopardy—assuming she isn’t actually going crazy instead in Stewart
Thorndike’s Lyle (trailer here), which screens as part of the 2018 Final Girls Berlin Film Festival.
Despite
some reservations, Leah agreed to move into Brooklyn with her wife June and
their toddler daughter Lyle. Obviously, that was her first mistake. For some
reason, she is never comfortable in the BKLN brownstone. She assumes it is the
creepy property manager, who seems to have some kind of unhealthy Munchausen pregnancy
thing going on. Of course, her unease gets even worse after tragedy strikes. Rather
conveniently, she is already pregnant with a spare, but she becomes even more alarmed
when she learns the macabre history of the building.
Thorndike
(she played one of the models in Eyes
Wide Shut) takes mucho inspiration from a classic horror movie that shall
remain nameless, but she gives the common premise several original twists. Reportedly,
during production, Lyle nearly became
a web-series before switching back to a feature. The indecision was probably
due to the betwixt-and-between running time of just over one hour. However, it
is nice to see a filmmaker create something so potent within such a manageable
time-frame. It is also quite remarkable how she maintains a consistent tone and
a steadily building sense of dread. Polanski is referenced six ways from
Sunday, yet somehow the end product is very much itself and rather terrifying.
It
seems like Gaby Hoffman has made a specialty of annoying hipster characters
designed to alienated well-adjusted viewers, so the visceral power of her work
here will surprise many. She falls apart spectacularly, in what might be her best
screen performance to date. Ingrid Jungermann and Kim Allen nicely establish
the two extreme poles in her imploding world: her increasingly distant partner June
and her concerned supermodel neighbor Taylor (only in Brooklyn).
