SSC 03: Krisha (Trey Edward Shults, 2015) — Excising Our Personal Demons

Tim and Tay discuss Trey Edward Shults’ feature debut Krisha, its expert use of horror tropes and its endlessly frugal composition. 

Krisha is a 2015 family drama about a recovering addict and alcoholic in her sixties attempting to reconnect with her family over Thanksgiving. Directed by Trey Edward Shults, Krisha stars his real-life aunt Krisha Fairchild in the eponymous lead role, and was produced on a crowd-sourced, shoe-string budget.  

Krisha is available as a digital rental on iTunes. 

Scene (51:39 — 55:18)

Starring Krisha Fairchild as Krisha, Robyn Fairchild as Robyn, Bill Wise as Doyle & Trey Edward Shults as Trey.

After a series of seemingly traumatic encounters with her mother and Trey, Krisha relapses, unceremoniously uncorking a bottle of wine with a pair of scissors in her bathroom. She guzzles back the bottle, entering an almost dream-like, euphoric state. Returning to her family downstairs for final dinner preparations, Krisha attempts to remove the giant family-sized Thanksgiving turkey from the oven. Her hands tremble and the turkey falls to the floor, creating an enormous mess and ruining the family dinner.

Links

3:00 — Krisha’s many awards

3:30 — Krisha as a short & following production

25:30 — “playful chaos”

27:00 — Anatomy Of A Scene with Trey Edward Shults

30:25 — Rules Of The Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)

32:00 — Paying for Nina Simone’s “Just In Time”

40:00 — Composer Briann McOmber on scoring Krisha

43:32 — Krisha, improvised

44:30 — Edward Shults’ grandmother in Krisha

Recommendations

Tim: Ponyo (Hayao Miyazaki, 2008) — available on Netflix

Tay: Exotica (Atom Egoyan, 1994) — available on The Criterion Channel

All links verified at the time of publication and based on availability in Canada.

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