GFF 2021: Black Bear
Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott and Sarah Gadon are electric as the three leads in Lawrence Michael Levine's metadrama concerned with shifting identities and cruel power games
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – a group of friends huddle up together in a lakeside cabin to see what bubbles to the surface once the conversation and the liquor start to flow.
Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and Blair (Sarah Gadon) play the established couple with a baby on the way. The arrival of Allison (Aubrey Plaza), gives them a fresh audience to tell their story to, battling for control of their relationship’s narrative. Allison herself takes turns playing the edgy contrarian, the partner in crime, the sister in solidarity – morphing herself to match the person she’s trying to impress.
Without spoiling it, Black Bear takes a meta turn halfway through that allows the lead trio to shift roles. But the game remains the same: a battle for narrative supremacy. Workplace abuse is re-told as artistic vision. Trauma hides behind irony. Actual emotions are passed off as play-acting.
It would be really easy for a film this inward-looking to devour itself completely, but Black Bear is kept ferociously alive by three crackling, protean lead performances that play every nervous glance and veiled comment like a form of sly emotional combat. And it sticks the landing too, with a gut-punch finale that underlines a simple fact: no matter how cleverly we tell or re-tell the story, at the centre of it all is a real person, real pain.
Black Bear has its UK premiere at Glasgow Film Festival, screening 27 Feb-2 Mar – tickets here
Released in the UK 23 Apr by Vertigo
Scroll on to read our interview with Black Bear director Lawrence Michael Levine