Cabin Fever

Black Bear is the sort of film that evades easy categorisation. It doesn’t have a narrative in the strictest sense. The actors play multiple roles, and are often lying about their identities within those roles. It is a dark, meditative, meta-nightmare that is often laugh-out-loud funny, and yes, there are several actual bears in it. There’s no neat solution that unlocks exactly what is going on.

Even the writer/director Lawrence Michael Levine at times feels unclear as to what he actually made. “When I was writing it, I didn’t know where I was going,” he tells “I had a lot going on in my personal life and a lot that I wanted to purge and things just kind of rolled out of me. I didn’t really know where the