Working with her husband, the filmmaker Bradley Rust Gray, the keenly attentive South Korea–born So Yong Kim has made three films that draw their titles from Cure songs: In Between Days (2006), The Exploding Girl (2009) and now this one. That factoid is actually a crucial window into her aesthetic, which is marked by internalized pain and a sense of romance (if not spiky goth hair).
Kim’s latest—like Carol made on an indie budget—is split in two exquisite halves. In the first part, we meet Sarah (Riley Keough, doing her best work to date), the forlorn mother of a three-year-old; her husband is a distant presence on Skype. She takes the opportunity to go on a mini road trip with Mindy (Jena Malone), an impulsive bleached-blond friend. In the film’s second half, the two characters have roughly swapped social positions—Mindy is about to get married—but their sexual attraction (never fully expressed) remains a palpable thing. Try this one.
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