Braid (2018)

Movie: Braid (2018), directed by Mitzi Peirone

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.53 miles, 9’01”/mile, 01:07:56 (light run)

 

Full disclosure: on balance, most people would say that I read too much into things. I was a literature major (sort of), and while that alone may tell you everything you need to know, I suspect you won’t fully appreciate the depth of what I’m saying until I also disclose that I watched I Know Who Killed Me twice, because I felt there may have been something more profound going on that was just beyond my grasp. Yes, I Know Who Killed Me. The movie in which Lindsay Lohan plays a stripper who gets a couple of limbs chopped off. That one. And the reason it’s so important that I tell you this is because tonight’s light-run movie was Braid.

 

I didn’t know the first thing about Braid when I cued it up—I went in 100% tabula rasa on this one, and I’m glad I did. At the outset, the plot seems straightforward enough: Petula and Tilda are two young women doing some desperate living, counting up the street value of the drugs they’re about to sell, when the police come a-knockin’ and they’re forced to flee and abandon their inventory. Now they have 48 hours in which to recoup the $80,000 they owe their supplier, so they ditch New York and hop a train back to Vermont, where they plan to visit their childhood friend Daphne. Daphne has a safe full of money hidden somewhere on her crumbling estate, but she’s a little… odd. Our two fugitives think they can find the safe and abscond with the cash, provided they play Daphne’s game. They are already familiar with the rules: 1) Everyone Must Play. 2) No Outsiders Allowed. 3) Nobody Leaves.

 

Even these simple facts are revealed piecemeal instead of being spoonfed to us. We have to do a little work to pull it together into a story, and in hindsight, that sets the tone for when things really go off the rails, and boy do they ever. Daphne’s game is a continuation of when the girls played house as little kids: Daphne is the mom, Tilda is her daughter, and Petula is a doctor giving Tilda her checkup—except now Petula checks Tilda’s reflexes with a hard swing to the knee with a meat tenderizer. And things get progressively more violent from there.

 

I don’t want to say much more about the story beyond the setup, because in some ways the film is more about the story than a means of telling the story, if that makes any sense (or even if it doesn’t). Everything about this movie is intended to disorient you. Time flashes backward and forward. Things that happen are undone moments later. Color becomes an agent of chaos—whereas Suspiria’s colors evoke nightmare, at least you knew something was out to get you; the colors in Braid evoke “bad drug trip” and inform you that god is dead but everything’s pretty. Camera angles don’t so much ignore gravity as stab it repeatedly and devour its corpse.

 

I think all of this conspires to short-circuit one’s ability to process linear progression and cause and effect. I often count paces while I’m running—yes, even while watching a horror movie. It’s just the way my brain is wired to process long, repetitive tasks. (Running for an hour sounds impossible; running for a minute sixty times in a row, not so much.) That said, I found I could not count paces while running to Braid. It’s just not that kind of a movie.

 

But I will say this: from a visual perspective, it is breathtakingly beautiful. Every shot is composed with an attention to detail bordering on the, well, obsessive. Several of the scenes (Tilda and Petula bound together with braided hair; the three women asleep and intertwined in a bathtub; the three in frilly dresses and porcelain masks as feathers float around them) taken as a whole feel like a series of photo shoots for the world’s weirdest calendar. 

 

One thing I do feel the need to mention is that I’ve seen a lot of reviews dinging this movie for “unrealistic” plot points, and that seems critically myopic to me. Yes, smashing in someone’s knee with a meat tenderizer will cripple them for life; yes, hitting someone in the head with a full-on swing from a baseball bat will do more than just knock them out cartoon-style for a little while. But these are not the plot holes the naysayers claim them to be—they are clues as to what’s real and what isn’t. And if that isn’t clear to you by the time disfiguring scars start miraculously disappearing, you might need a better attention span, because you almost certainly missed, for example, the Keyser Söze moment when the women are painting toward the end.

 

It’s hard to bottom-line a movie that has no bottom and precious few lines, but I can say that whether or not you will enjoy Braid will depend more than usual on your tastes and mood. If you like linear and unambiguous plots and are fond of telling yourself “that definitely happened,” you should stay away. If you enjoy ambiguity and mystery and don’t shy away from experimental narrative and film (and are allergic to neither challenge nor pretentiousness), you might get a lot out of Braid. And if you’re the type who lives and dies by what other people say, then Braid is either a thinker or it’s trash. Either way, it’s not an easy watch. I can tell you this, though: I’m definitely going to see it again.