PIECES OF A WOMAN
Cert 15
On Netflix now
This film may shimmer with “quality” – but despite the powerful performances and
glossy production values, it failed to engage me.
In a gruelling 24-minute opening sequence, shot in a single take, Martha (Vanessa Kirby) gives birth in the Boston apartment she shares with husband Sean (Shia LaBeouf).
I doubt a fictional delivery has ever been so realistically wrought. It is exceptional film-making by Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo, the camera gliding around the room, exposing the brutality of childbirth and capturing the ultimate joy and the
hardest despair as the newborn girl dies moments later.
As a demonstration of technical talents in Mundruczo’s first English-language feature, it is mightily impressive, yet somehow uninvolving.
After this tragedy, Martha and Sean fall apart, and so does the film. The pieces fail to come together satisfactorily.
Kirby, who stole every scene as the young Princess Margaret in The Crown, clearly has a special skill for playing a damaged woman.
And LaBeouf is good, furiously mumbling away as the blue-collar husband struggling to cope while his posher wife turns in on herself.
Yet I found the cold heart at the centre of the film hard to take.