Holiday Is Hard To Watch But Extremely Well-Made

CW: Discussions of Sexual assault follow

If you took a quick glimpse of Sascha (Victoria Carmen Sonne) basking in the sun in a fancy bikini on a lavish boat, you'd presume that she's living the ideal luxurious life. But Holiday makes it clear from the outset with a scene depicting one of her boyfriend's associated hitting her that her life is way more harrowing than that. Sascha is trapped in an abusive relationship with gangster Michael (Lai Yde) and writer/director Isabella Elkof is exploring her psyche and perspective during this relationship all throughout Holiday. This is not a story with a happy ending of a person escaping an abusive relationship, rather, it's a tale about the messy explanations for how and why the cycle of abuse continues onward.

Lynne Ramsay And Samantha Morton Deliver A Mesmerizing Portrait of Coping With Grief In The Excellent Morvern Callar

And so, having now finally watched Morvern Callar, I've seen all four of Lynne Ramsay's feature-film directorial effort. Though Morvern Callar might be the weakest of Ramsay's movies, that's a lot like saying that a specific Carly Rae Jepsen song is her weakest. Jepsen's songs, like Ramsay's directorial efforts, are just varying degrees of exceptional, there really isn't a dud in the bunch. This Morvern Callar is yet another impressive and harrowing piece of filmmaking from one of the best directors working today, one that sees Ramsay turning her artistic focus on people's mental-based struggles in the wake of tragedy onto the story of a woman grappling with her boyfriend's suicide.

Lynne Ramsay Kicked Off Her Directorial Career In A Masterful Fashion With Ratcatcher

Sometimes, a director debuts with a film that manages to totally capture the elements that would come to define their work as a filmmaker. In the case of Lynne Ramsay, her recurring exploration of the internal mental perspectives of her lead characters is evident not just somewhere within her first feature film, Ratcatcher, but in its very first opening scene! Ratcatcher opens with its lead characters, James Gillespie (William Eadie), twirling round and round with a curtain covering his face. Noises of idyllic sounds of children laughing and playing emanating from within the mind of James are heard as he continues to play with the curtain until they're abruptly cut off by his mother ripping the curtain off of James and warning him of the dangers of wrapping his head up in a curtain.

We Need To Talk About How Harrowing And Excellent Lynne Ramsay's We Need To Talk About Kevin Is

How does one go in in the face of tragedy? When our conventional world is so shattered by unexpected events, it seems impossible to just keep on going with our normal lives. Tragedy has a way of just sticking around in our lives and there's no surefire way to cope with that. Over the years, we've had a large number of movies covering the process of trying to going on with our lives in the wake of tragedy, some of them rising to the level of greatness in their level of overall quality (for instance, Manchester By The Sea is one of the most realistic portraits of this process). But hands down, one of the best films covering this specific experience is Lynne Ramsey's 2011 motion picture We Need To Talk About Kevin.