Christine
Rebecca Hall gives an impressive performance as suicidal news reporter Christine Chubbuck, but director Antonio Campos never quite gets to grips with his subject
Based on true events, Christine aims to get into the head of Christine Chubbuck (played by Rebecca Hall) in the weeks that led up to her unravelling. Working at a local news station in Florida, Christine sees herself as superior to her co-workers – except, perhaps, the station’s news anchor, George (Michael C. Hall), with whom she’s smitten; not that he, or anyone, would know it, as Christine’s default state is extreme discomfort. Due to the station’s rock bottom ratings, Christine and the team are pushed to develop ‘juicier’ stories. Simply put: “If it bleeds, it leads.” When the owner of the station visits, Christine sees it as her opportunity to make her mark.
Antonio Campos’ latest plays rather like Network-lite. It dabbles in detailing the public’s desire for bloody and salacious tales, but the director never truly commits, and seems to be in two minds as to whether to condemn or to play devil’s advocate. Chubbuck’s local news stories are twee and forgettable, so when her boss (Tracy Letts, clearly tasked with playing his character with an almost Boo! Hiss! unlikeability, but coming across more sympathetically than Christine) tells her to come up with meatier, juicier stories, it’s often hard to disagree with him.
Unnerving, uneasy cinema is Campos’ raison d’etre, so it’s a shame that in attempting to keep Christine’s tension piano-wire tight from start to finish he has overstretched himself. The sense of foreboding in the first 30 minutes is almost as gut-wrenching as the peculiar pains Christine finds herself struggling with at the start of the film, but it proves unsustainable, as Campos fails to focus on whether he’s making Network-redux, a character study, or a horror story about what society can drive us to do.
In an attempt to make such quibbling meaningless, Rebecca Hall delivers her most engaging – and unsettling – performance to date. In other hands, Christine would have been an awkward accumulation of ticks, quirks, and mannerisms, but Hall makes her feel fully lived in. That said, her work is briefly undone on the handful of occasions Campos allows a close-up, as Hall's innate luminosity shines through despite hunched shoulders and heavy make-up – which explains why Campos mostly stays at arm’s length. Unfortunately, this holds true to Christine’s internal world as well, as Campos never credibly gets to grips with what is driving her.
Christine is released 27 Jan by Artifical Eye