Tags : Cinelogue

Martel’s cinema radiates the sense of multiple things going on just outside our and the characters’ consciousness(es), just beyond comprehension, which keeps her films at a near-constant level of anxiety, although it’s never quite clear how much of this feeling stems from concrete reasons within the film and how much is just a psychological effect she is able to conjure in her characters in an attempt to accurately reflect their jostled and transient states. Much of this uncertainty has to come from Martel’s totalizing, exacting audiovisual approach, which combines decidedly fragmentary compositions, aggressively elliptical editing, and atmospheric sound design.