Imagine that you’ve just been interviewed for the nightly news on the 30th anniversary of your child’s disappearance. A day — maybe two days — later, you get a phone call. The woman on the other end of the line, whose voice you do not recognize, falters a bit and then drops this bombshell: “I think that I’m, um — I think that I might be your daughter Brooke.” What would you say? And if you invited her over for dinner…well, what then?
With her feature debut Nancy, writer/director Christina Choe uses these questions to craft a fragile, quiet mystery that eschews melodrama and the usual thriller beats as it explores what one cruel trick of fate might mean for three damaged people.
Nancy is these incredible actors’ film to carry. Every reaction, every pause, what’s said and unsaid — it’s all pregnant with meaning. Using his skills as a psychologist, Leo asks insensitive questions as sensitively as possible. Ellen, a comparative literature professor, sees in Nancy — an unpublished, if not untalented, writer — the daughter she was denied and a talent that might yet blossom. Using nothing but a little back-pocket actorly magic, Smith-Cameron and Buscemi become that old married couple whose gently bohemian middle-class idyll is ruptured by a ghost from their past. As Nancy’s Parkinson’s-afflicted “mother,” Dowd shines in yet another supporting turn. And in just two scenes, John “I was the hellclown in Spawn” Leguizamo etches quite an impression as a grieving father who finds himself drawn to Nancy.
“Mom…Dad…do you remember when John Leguizamo was in Spawn?”
Even against these great understated performances, Riseborough is the real star here. Study Riseborough’s expressions, and the truth of her character is clear in moments; stare too long and you risk tumbling down a rabbit hole. We learn just enough about Nancy to doubt her claims, but damned if she isn’t the spitting image of an age-progressed photo of their missing daughter. And in what might be Riseborough’s wisest choice, villainy is taken off the table. As Riseborough plays her, Nancy is either an orphan who has finally found her people or a victim of her own false memories. Maybe both.
If I’m being vague, it’s because Nancy lives and dies on the strength of our uncertainty, and even if the film more or less gives us a solution to the mystery, it barely qualifies as a climax and denies us a definitive ending. I’ve wrestled with Choe’s narrative choices in the final third, once we know all we need to know. While it busts the lock on its chosen genre, it follows logically from everything we’ve learned about the characters and everything we’ve inferred about Nancy. Is it satisfying? Not entirely. Is it appropriate? Yes. Is it poetic? Most definitely.
So soon after Hereditary, Nancy is another reminder that a well-crafted debut can feel infinitely more alive than a great director’s magnum opus. Choe makes bold decisions, choosing correctly where veteran directors may have stumbled. She casts heavyweights like Dowd and John Leguizamo in smaller parts; imagine the temptation to expand their roles at the expense of a deft runtime! She enlists cinematographer Zoe White, not for the polish and pop she brings to The Handmaid’s Tale, but because she can make handheld camera movement seem spontaneous even as she carefully captures important details. She switches aspect ratios twenty minutes into the film in a movement so fluid and subtle, it surely qualifies as one of the best edits of 2018.
Most importantly, Choe — fearlessly, maybe even recklessly — takes the elements of what would have been a riveting thriller and instead creates a chamber piece as curious and enigmatic as Nancy herself.