Out of Blue
Directed by CAROL MORLEY
Starring PATRICIA CLARKSON, JAMES CAAN, JACKI WEAVER
Released 29 MARCH
enre – you either take it at face value and play by the rules, or get the hell out of the kitchen. is the latest feature from British director Carol Morley, her follow-up to 2014’s intriguing but ineffective exploration of mass hysteria, . This one is a laconic, self-consciously moody southern policier with designs on the celestial infinite. It beckons, perhaps unwisely, the swaddling comfort blanket of genre with one hand while violently repelling it with the other. Bravo to the director for doubling down on light experimentation and once more embracing an unconventional storytelling mode, but it’s hard to sugar coat the fact that the resulting film is an ugly, perplexing catastrophe. The usually reliable Patricia Clarkson is miscast as insular Detective Mike Hoolihan. She struggles to find an emotional foothold in a depressive, apparently brilliant loner whose temperament alters radically (and randomly) from scene to scene.
