Two Gates of Sleep

The title of New York artist Alistair Banks Griffin’s arty indie film debut is an allusion to Virgil’s Aenied, which suggests metaphysical/mythological pretensions on the director’s part in his depiction of the mysterious efforts of two Mississippi backwoods boys (Brady Corbet and David Call) to drag miles upstream their dead, heavy coffin-ed mother (Karen Young) for what these obsessed, authorities-scorning, huntin’, fishin’, ever arguin’ siblings deem a ‘proper’ burial for her. You can detect, too, the influence of Tarkovsky – or, according to the LFF notes, Carlos Reygadas – in the numinous widescreen nature imagery that cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes provides to accompany it. What’s less clear is the meaning of the brothers' occasionally uttered angry, mumbled expletives, the mad ravings of their ill mother before she dies or, indeed, quite what the hell the director himself is trying to say, if anything at all, in this annoying, over-earnest, if competently mounted, depiction of out-of-time rural living, biblical rivalry and existential angst.