What Keeps You Alive: Happy Anniversary

Good golly, why didn’t they just get a nice hotel suite? Instead, Jules and Jackie thought it would be romantic to spend their one-year anniversary at the latter’s family hunting cabin. Alas, their two-year anniversary looks increasingly unlikely as events spin out of control in Colin Minihan’s What Keeps You Alive (spoilery trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

There is a big game-changing twist pretty early on in the first act that would really be shame to reveal. You might still guess it from some of the awkward phrases that will follow, but if you haven’t ben tipped off to it, Minihan does a nice job camouflaging it for ten or fifteen minutes. We’re not kidding here—it’s a big one.

Regardless, Jules the city slicker will be pushed to her limits, both physically and emotionally. She might not be the outdoorsy type like her wife, but she has a strong survival drive. She endures all kinds of pain and nasty injuries, but the drama always feels completely believable in the moment.

Looking considerably more mature than she has in prior scream queen roles (such as Extraterrestrial and It Stains the Sand Red), Brittany Allen does arguably her career best work as Jules. Even when she is totally and utterly freaked out, Allen shows flashes of her intelligence and resilience. Hannah Emily Anderson also makes for a heck of a gung-ho outdoors sports enthusiast.

One of the possible advantages of What Keep’s hush-hush secret is that it makes it harder for the easily offended to complain, because that would commit the mortal sin of spoiling. In any event, it is bound to be divisive, so genre fans should see it sooner rather than later, before the party-poopers let the cat out of the bag. Still, Minihan has a few more surprises up his sleeve in what is a lethally effective, lean and mean thriller, perched on the boundary of psycho-horror.

There is no question What Keeps is alsso Minihan’s best work since the original Grave Encounters, which he co-helmed with Stuart Ortiz, under their Vicious Brothers moniker. It is a relentless film that will leave even jaded genre fans shocked, but satisfied. Very highly recommended, What Keeps You Alive opens this Friday (8/24) in New York, at the IFC Center.

Backgammon: Lifestyles of the Rich and Neurotic

Miranda sure loves to play that ancient board game. Maybe her house guest Lucian should try to cross her up with a game of Acey-deucey. It probably wouldn’t matter. She is a much better games-player than he is. The rich and neurotic will duly play each other in Francisco Orvañanos’s hothouse chamber drama Backgammon (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

The idea was for Lucian to chill out with his uptight girlfriend Elizabeth and his well-heeled pal Andrew, at the latter’s family vacation home while on break from Yale. Unfortunately, they arrive finding Andrew’s sister Miranda and her parasite boyfriend Gerald are already there, drinking and bickering like characters in an early draft of a Tennessee Williams play. Andrew bails almost immediately and Elizabeth will soon follow him. She is especially keen to leave when she apparently catches Lucian in a somewhat compromising position with Miranda.

Realizing what a drag Gerald is, she finally gives the supposed painter the heave-ho. According to Miranda, he left in a snit, but Lucian starts to suspect Gerald has returned to play petty mind games with them. The prime evidence is a large unfinished nude study of Miranda that someone has steadily worked on since his departure. That actually might be a decent device for generating suspense if there was any sense of danger in Backgammon (aside from the very real possibility someone might develop cirrhosis of the liver). Instead, Orvañanos strangely opts to avoid any such tacky thriller elements.

As a result, it is hard to say just what Backgammon is supposed to be. There is a fair degree of tension, but it is mostly rooted in the characters’ obsessive hang-ups. Consider it a peak into the privileged world of the rich and neurotic. They certainly make middle class respectability look appealing.

Still, you have to give Brittany Allen credit for a rather bold performance. Sometimes kittenish and sometimes twitchy, she always conveys a sense Miranda is just a McMansion full of trouble. On the other hand, Noah Silver’s Lucian is duller than dishwater. At least Alex Beh seems to enjoy Gerald’s boorish behavior, whereas Olivia Crocicchia appears just as bored by Elizabeth’s joyless nagging as the rest of us are.

There are a handful of revelations that suggest Backgammon was originally envisioned as an exercise in suspense of some sort, but there are never any stakes at risk. It is just a perfectly good getaway weekend sabotaged by the dysfunctional characters. Allen is weirdly fascinating to watch, but even she cannot jumpstart the film’s energy level. A baffling oddity that doesn’t really have a niche to fill, Backgammon opens tomorrow (3/11) in New York, at the Cinema Village.