Charlie Countryman (2013)

The premise arrives with the confidence of a fever dream. Charlie Countryman loses his mother, flies to Bucharest at her dying request, watches a stranger die mid-flight, and promptly falls for the dead man's daughter, a cellist with a revolver in her purse and a violent husband in her past. Fredrik Bond directs his debut like a man who has absorbed the mood of European art cinema without its meaning. Magic realism drips from every frame. Critics were unkind, and they were not wrong.

For those of us who audit such matters, the picture is a strange specimen: nearly empty. The cast is white on white, American and Romanian and British and Danish, with no comment on who gets to appear. Race goes unmentioned in a city with a complicated history. There is no environmental pleading, no class grievance dressed up as plot, no celebration of the unidealized body, no diagnosis offered as characterization, no history bent to flatter the present. The criminals are simply criminals. The strip-club debt is a plot mechanic, not a manifesto. Nobody lectures anyone. The film has no agenda beyond getting Charlie into the water and back out of it.

One modest exception exists, and it is modest indeed. Gabi is given a gun, a past, and the choice to spare a man she was ordered to kill, which grants her a sliver of agency. Around that sliver sits a male-protagonist romance filmed the way such romances are always filmed. Evan Rachel Wood later argued publicly that censors should not have trimmed a scene of her character receiving pleasure. That was her advocacy, delivered in interviews. The film itself does not carry it. We are left with a pulpy, atmospheric thriller that means nothing and apologizes for nothing, which is its own peculiar integrity. We classify it accordingly and move along.