Hill Country noir

Barracuda

Barracuda, the second feature from Jason Cortland and Julia Halperin, is a thrumming murder ballad of a movie. Set in Austin and the Texas Hill Country, the film unspools the slow-burning story of Sinaloa (Sophie Reid), a vagabond London musician who shows up on the doorstep of Merle (Allison Tolman), claiming to be her half-sister. The two get to know each other at a fast pace, bonded by the memory of Wayne, their recently deceased country-star father, while others in the family, including Merle’s mother ( JoBeth Williams) begin to seriously question the increasingly volatile Sinaloa’s motives. Executiveproduced by the distinguished director Bruce Beresford (Tender Mercies) and anchored by a searing soundtrack that is specific to the Austin Americana tradition, Barracuda features live performances by Texas musicians Butch Hancock of the Flatlanders; Bob Livingston, a fixture of Austin’s 1970s cosmic cowboy music scene; Colin Gilmore, son of Flatlander Jimmie Dale Gilmore; the Mastersons, who are touring with Steve Earle; and the dance-hall alt-country band the Harvest Thieves.

Cortlund and Halperin deliberately set out to make a psychological thriller that springs from the well of murder ballads. Cortlund said his screenplay was inspired by “that tradition that started in the British Isles and came to America. It was the love of that music, and everyone from the Louvin Brothers to Nick Cave. Everyone who understands that, understands the film.” Halperin added, “We also kind of think of it as Tender Mercies from the daughter’s point of view — this is another version of that story, in a way.” Beresford came on board as executive producer after he saw Cortlund and Halperin’s first film, Now, Forager (2012), and offered his assistance on any upcoming projects they might have in the hopper. Halperin said, “We happened to be developing this film that was very influenced by Tender Mercies .It was the perfect support at the perfect time from the perfect person.”

Beresford’s 1983 drama starring Robert Duvall is the tale of a broken-down country singer trying to reconnect with his daughter and get his life together. In Barracuda, Sinaloa, too, barely knew her iconic father, though she inherited his sharp, melancholic musical abilities. She attaches herself to Merle in order to glean more insights into the family, but her jealousy and alienation from having been neglected all her life threaten to boil over in nearly every scene, arousing the suspicions of family members who suspect her to be a grifter. The dramatic tension between the family-oriented, genteel Merle and the feral Sinaloa is the heart of the film, echoing other recent movies about uneasy friendships between women, like Always Shine (2016) and Queen of Earth (2015). Sinaloa and other musicians in the movie function as a Greek chorus of sorts, building a taut atmosphere with portentous lyrics like “We’re in for nasty weather/’Cause things are going to get worse before they ever get better.”

We lean on literary traditions for inspiration quite a bit, and so both the music and how Patricia Highsmith constructs character, those were things that we were mindful of and that we love. — filmmaker Jason Cortlund

One incandescent scene is built around a bonfire of musicians, as Sinaloa performs Gilmore’s new arrangement of the standard “Pretty Polly.” Reid infuses the tale of a young woman’s violent stabbing death with a sinewy rage that’s transfixing — if the audience thought something was off with Sinaloa beforehand, they’re convinced of it by the time the song is over. “Everything that you’re seeing is shot in real time,” Cortlund said, with all the musical performances in the film having been recorded live with no overdubs. Gilmore also spent time with Reid, teaching her Texas-style fingerpicking. “We work very hard for authenticity,” Halperin added. “People in Austin who pay attention to that kind of music — they would know in five seconds if we were faking it.”

Sinaloa’s character was also inspired, the filmmakers said, by the novels of Patricia Highsmith. “A lot of people don’t know that she’s a native Texan,” Cortlund said. He wrote the first draft of the story at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, where Highsmith wrote Strangers on a Train. “We lean on literary traditions for inspiration quite a bit, and so both the music and how Highsmith constructs character like she does in Strangers on a Train or The Talented Mr. Ripley, those were things that we were mindful of and that we love.”

The changing character of Austin and its surrounding Hill Country — which has experienced astronomical population growth since the 1990s, when Cortlund and Halperin met at graduate school at the University of Texas — plays a key role in the movie, with filming locations at local haunts like the Saxon Pub, a musicians’ hangout. The most chilling and climactic scenes take place at a lush swimming hole outside the city, in McKinney Falls State Park. Sinaloa arrives in Austin expecting something like the down-home hippie, outlaw country scene her father came up in during the 1970s, and instead confronts an urban landscape of under-construction high-rises and traffic snarls. Even bucolic Fredericksburg, in the Hill Country, is somewhat sardonically dubbed “the next Napa” by Merle. “The changes that are happening in Austin, I see it in New York and in Boston and in San Francisco, too. There’s development, and places are losing their local character,” Halperin said. “Sinaloa is a very nostalgic character,” Cortlund added. “She’s grown up with this idea of Texas and Austin that’s very cast in amber and very romantic, and that kind of trauma of it not still being what she imagines it to be is, as much as anything, part of what kind of sets things off on the wrong note.”

Barracuda is distributed by Orion Pictures and Samuel Goldwyn Films and will stream on a digital platform later this year. Its reception has pleased the filmmakers, who premiered it in competition at South by Southwest in the spring and were nominated for a Grand Jury Award. “The people that connect with it really connect with it,” Halperin said. “I don’t do this so that a large number of people can kind of think the film’s OK. I want somebody — or a lot of somebodies — to love it.”