![]() At a certain point, it becomes clear Joanna’s flashing back to those months in Melbourne from a courtroom in Glasgow, where she is a defendant facing a very nasty, aggressive prosecutor. The editing, the script, and the photography all make very effective use of the confusion and pain and shifting guilt and blame and allegiance, the obsessive revisiting of certain moments in time, flashing back and forward in the story with certain details added or omitted. (If you have not, please trust me, it’s painfully realistic.) Losing a child and being in the public eye over it is something I have not personally experienced, but no one has to have been there to imagine how harrowing that would be. What’s Al’s ex (Asher Keddie) doing snooping around their rental property? What’s up with the teenage daughter? Why aren’t the police focusing on the red car that drove down the street just before Joanna got out of her own car and went into the convenience store? Why does Alistair seem to be advising Joanna to cry more when people are watching them?Īnyone who’s had a baby, and especially anyone who’s had a difficult birth, a difficult infant, or postpartum depression, will instantly recognize the fishbowl-of-the-mind disorientation, dislocation and time-distortion we glimpse when we appear to be in Joanna’s point of view. The expressions on Joanna’s face are strange, dissociated. The day Alistair and Joanna arrive, after a harrowing flight with a shrieking baby and a cabin full of resentful co-passengers, they make a pit stop at a convenience store and, after leaving the car unattended for just a minute, find the baby is not in the car seat.Īside from the obvious fact that an infant has disappeared, though-something’s wrong. Her husband, Alistair (Ewen Leslie), wants to go from Scotland to his childhood home, outside Melbourne, where his first wife has absconded and “stolen” his teenage daughter, Chloe (Markella Kavenagh), after their marriage fell apart. Joanna (Jenna Coleman) is the young mother of a colicky newborn. It’s brilliantly done and highly evocative of the bizarre, flashback-riddled, lost-time landscape of trauma. It takes a few minutes to get your footing and, while this could have been an on-the-nose flop as a technique, it’s not. The four hours of The Cry cut back and forth relentlessly, chopping past and present narratives into spliced, stochastic and muddled webs of connected moments. ![]() This excruciating breakdown of a toxic marriage will keep most people on the edges of their chairs. The Cry, a four-part psychological thriller from the BBC (now making its way to SundanceTV), is definitely not just for people who need re-schooling on “gaslighting,” an abnormal psychology term that’s been abused in a pathology-obsessed and relentlessly finger-pointing cultural moment, but for sure it can also do that for you. They drive toward the billowing smoke, and we follow them into a very extended metaphor. The baby in the backseat is quiet for the first time in what seems like days. The man behind the wheel is tense, but nonchalant enough about the scent on the breeze he’s used to eucalyptus wildfires, to how fast they move and how hot they burn and to the strange terpene aromatics in the smoke. The disoriented woman wants to know what that smell is. ![]() If you’re used to wet, green, hilly Scotland, it’s probably an existentially terrifying landscape, more like Purgatory than Australia, especially if you haven’t slept normally in months. The horizon is wide and bleary and flat and pale, and columns of smoke blur the sky in the distance. In an interview with The Associated Press, Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, revealed that the word has "risen so quickly in the English language in the last four years".This review originally published with the show’s Sundance Now premiere in November of 2018 The 1,740 per cent increase in lookups for the word gaslighting, made it the Merriam Webster word of the year in 2022. In case you missed it: How to Know if You're Being Gaslighted: 5 Telltale Signs His mysterious activities in the attic cause the house's gas lights to dim, but he insists that they are not and that his wife is being delusional. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines gaslighting as “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for one’s own advantage." The term originated from Patrick Hamilton's 1928 play Gas Light which follows the story of a husband attempting to make his wife insane in order to steal from her.
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