Most of the movie is spent watching Theresa as she wanders around the airy house that’s been newly bequeathed to her; more often than not, she’s wearing one of the slips that her mother left behind, the fabric growing tattered as she moves from room to room like somebody else’s ghost. TestingMom.com can help with: 2,000+ Woodcock Johnson practice questions that cover both the Standard and Extended Batteries to help your child build confidence and familiarity for Test Day. Case in point: Theresa spends much of her time alone and in the bathroom, in the bath even, but she never removes her expensive-looking undergarments, which feels weird and gross to comment upon were it not so jarring and did it not occupy so much of the movie. Interviews with leading film and TV creators about their process and craft. Or in using a map. Grief always carries the trimmings of psychosis, but this is something else — she’s not just mourning, she’s practically living a Polanski film. Woodshock in US theaters September 22, 2017 starring Kirsten Dunst, Joe Cole, Pilou Asbæk. Or what happens to Nick. Woodshock is a movie which doesn’t seem to have much interest in being a movie. On the contrary, they’re in a race to go off the beaten trail, chasing their muse wherever it leads them. It’s the first sign of a film ignorantly disengaged from its audience: Why should we care about this sad, sad scene when we know absolutely next to nothing about these characters? Check out the below links, may contain affiliate links. “Do you ever regret it,” Theresa asks Nick, “cutting everything down?” Each massive tree is another life lost, and they’re not growing back. Nick works as a lumberjack—Theresa asks him, reflecting the Mulleavys’ uniformly tone-deaf dialogue, “Do you ever regret cutting it all down?”—while Theresa takes a bereavement leave from her tenure at a local medical marijuana dispensary, where she secretly helps clients commit suicide by giving them the same weed/liquid concoction she gave her mom. (Actually, we first meet Theresa just before she assists her mother, in voiceover basically explaining what the title of the movie means, wandering aimlessly through the woods.) Instead, Woodshock operates as a 100-minute vignette, steeped in visual flair but sans anything resembling a resolute story about people and the consequences of their everyday actions. Woodshock is a movie which doesn’t seem to have much interest in being a movie. Directed by Kate Mulleavy, Laura Mulleavy. This movie is a lot of things, but compromised isn’t one of them. Fandango FANALERT® Sign up for a FANALERT® and be the first to know when tickets and other exclusives are available in your area. Echoes of “The Virgin Suicides” reverberate throughout, especially when Peter Flickenberg’s camera follows Dunst into the forest and lies down with her in the grass. The corpse isn’t even cold before Theresa begins to break down. Upon returning to work at the dispensary—apparently to help a sick old man, Ed (Steph DuVall), to kill himself, because Keith isn’t capable of pouring a few drops of poison liquid into a bag of weed?—Theresa’s grief leads to a (ludicrous) case of mistaken indica, causing their friend Johnny (Jack Kilmer) to die (off screen) because he smoked the poison weed. “Woodshock” offers a whole lot to look at, but not all that much to see. Owner of the dispensary is Keith (Pilou Asbæk, best known lately as Euron Greyjoy), an obnoxious lothario who’s obviously in love with Theresa and dresses like Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite. Woodshock was released in 2017 on Friday, September 22, 2017 (Limited release). ‘Soul’ Aims for Oscar Glory as Disney Shifts to Streaming, but Not All Films Deserve the Same Release, How Closed Theaters, Drive-In Movies, and Netflix Supremacy Are Shaping Oscar Season, ‘Chicago 7’ Vs. the World: How Aaron Sorkin’s Awards-Friendly Epic Jolted a Strange Awards Season, Introducing ‘Deep Dive’: Damon Lindelof and His Team Go Behind the Scenes of ‘Watchmen’, ‘Succession’: How Editing Helps Every Dinner Scene Come to Life — Deep Dive, Becoming Hooded Justice: The ‘Watchmen’ Craft Team Analyzes the Emotional, Pivotal Scene – Deep Dive, 40 Must-See New Movies to See This Fall Season, The Best Movies Eligible for the 2021 Oscars Right Now, Jessie Buckley Won’t Explain ‘Ending Things,’ but She Will Reveal What Terrified Her Most. Kirsten Dunst stars as Theresa, a haunted young woman spiraling in the wake of profound loss, torn between her fractured emotional state a Directors: Kate Mulleavy, Laura Mulleavy Writers: Kate Mulleavy, Laura Mulleavy Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Pilou Asbæk, Joe Cole, Jack Kilmer, Steph DuVall Release Date: September 22, 2017. This Article is related to: Film and tagged A24, Reviews, rodarte, Woodshock. Killing the planet and letting a loved one die with dignity are two very different things, and the mismatch between these concepts is more disorienting than any of the film’s hazy superimpositions. Composer Peter Raeburn, too, is magnanimous with his overtures, pushing the Mulleavys’ images out of stasis and into thornier emotional thickets. A shockingly violent scene in the film’s third act is both so expected and so unearned that it can’t be real, because the alternative is pointlessness to the point of incompetence. But bearing witness to such an intimate document is a different task entirely. Movie Insider ® is a registered mark of The Movie Insider LLC. Or what we’re even remotely supposed to take from all this narrative fuckery. The actress has never had less to work with, but she holds our attention. All Rights Reserved. © 2020 Paste Media Group. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! There’s a palpable sense of liberation during the sequences in which Theresa wanders through the wilderness, the Rodarte ethos finally taking off from the runway. On or about May 10, 2017, the film was in Completed status. Who is like that—and who is this movie for? Sign up for our Email Newsletters here. Woodshock Ending Explained: Does Theresa Die? Grade: C “Woodshock” opens in theaters on September 22. But for the most part, Woodshock, their directorial debut, doesn’t feel like a fashion movie, perhaps until its closing moments. Dom Sinacola is Associate Movies Editor at Paste and a Portland-based writer. What’s never explained is why Theresa never dies from the stuff—is she some sort of wood nymph, a mythical creature of the forest?—or what she gains from the experience. There were 14 other movies released on the same date, including Kingsman: The Golden Circle, The LEGO Ninjago Movie and Stronger. “Woodshock” offers a whole lot to look at, but not all that much to see. The Mulleavy sisters are on much shakier grounds when they try to articulate that same relationship. Theresa wiles away her ill-defined days feeling terrible about helping her mother die, haunting her already haunted house, pissing Nick off and pretending Keith isn’t an intolerable dirtbag. Or a script, it would seem. As such, it breathes with care and love, with the sort of indulgence that comes from creating something ornate for its own sake both with people and in a place you deeply care about. If the Mulleavys are against euthanasia, it’s impossible to tell, though Johnny’s death is represented as both a mistake and an inevitability. A look at the Woodshock behind-the-scenes crew and production team. The only real sense of disdain comes in the form of Nick’s job cutting down Humboldt, which the Mulleavys would rather address with obvious symbolism than any sort of sense as to the actual environmental destruction and the moral gray area both Nick and Theresa navigate on a daily basis.