Despite a few narrative issues, including an odd, over-weighted front end and a denouement that feels like an afterthought, Paint It Black is never less than captivating.
The film’s screenplay, co-written by Tamblyn and Ed Dougherty, takes some wild turns, but Tamblyn delicately underplays its most shocking revelations, striking a tricky balance between authentic emotion and pulpy melodramatics. But the two eventually form a twisted sort of truce, with Josie coming to live at Meredith’s house in an arrangement that has shades of the psychosexual relationship between Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. Unhinged and impetuous, she physically attacks her at Michael’s funeral and even threatens to have her murdered. Meredith, a severe, unhappy woman who lives in a shadowy mansion filled with ornate furniture and taxidermied polar bears, blames Josie for Michael’s suicide.
The two are a study in contrasts, Josie’s tattoos-and-ripped-fishnets punk style clashing sharply with Meredith’s prim and proper upper-crust elegance. The result is an unusually enchanting film about grief, one that visually evokes its characters’ raw emotions while maintaining an aestheticized distance from their wrenching despair.Ĭapturing the emotional fallout from the suicide of a young man, Michael (Rhys Wakefield, glimpsed only in flashbacks), the film centers on the inimical relationship between his girlfriend, Josie (Alia Shawkat), and his mother, Meredith (Janet McTeer). Based on a 2006 novel by Janet Fitch, Paint It Black combines the brooding intensity of a slow-burn thriller with the high-flown ornamentation of a gothic melodrama. But in place of the violent nihilism that often marks those directors’ work, Tamblyn tells a story of grief and loss that enriches her luscious visuals. The sleek, exquisitely composed surfaces of Amber Tamblyn’s directorial debut, Paint It Black, suggest the hyper-stylized aesthetic of Park Chan-wook or Nicholas Winding Refn.
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