Review: The dam never breaks in emotionally dry Jennifer Lawrence drama ‘Causeway’
The first 20 minutes of writer-director Lenny Abrahamson’s directorial debut, ‘Causeway,’ are like something out of a horror movie, with a simple premise and a very simple explanation.
In 2012, a mother with two young daughters heads to a small town in rural Wisconsin to visit her daughter. The trip turns into something much more terrifying when she doesn’t return.
In the following scene, 20 minutes later, her husband is dead. Her two children are with police.
In an even darker and more realistic scenario, her older daughter also goes missing. The whole family is now living in a trailer park on the edge of town.
It’s a very different story than what an audience might expect to see in a typical horror movie, and it should be, with Abrahamson’s debut, ‘Causeway,’ a simple but effective thriller.
And it’s very effective, with one twist that will most definitely leave audiences scratching their heads.
It’s a tale of pure horror that unfolds in an unforgiving way, with a simple “what if” question in the film’s story.
We’re talking about a mother who drives to her daughter’s house after her children disappear.
Her young daughter who’s been missing for four days is also in the car at the time, but she doesn’t see her mother return.
A few days later, the mother is in the car in the same spot; our young daughter, who is still missing, is in the car with police officers.
One car, one dead girl.
It’s a very different story than what an audience might expect to see in a typical horror movie, and it should be, with Abrahamson’s debut a simple but effective thriller.
And it’s very effective, with one twist that will most definitely leave audiences scratching their heads.
“I just think about this little girl, who is really sick. She just needs help,” she tells the audience in the movie’s brief moments of silence. “There’s no place to go. And then you put it on the back burner,” the actress said at a press event for the movie