Woodshock
Have you ever arrived at a party late, and everyone is already really high, so you might as well watch movies at home because nobody makes sense?
That’s the experience of watching “Woodshock,” a beautifully shot but disarmingly tedious directorial debut by the fashion world’s Mulleavy sisters. Great care has been taken to film Kirsten Dunst through filters, reflections and filtered reflections, with no effort to connect the subject matter — whatever it may be — with the paying audience.
The movie seems almost deliberately confounding. Example: Every visual choice points to the movie taking place in the 1970s, from the lovingly shot corded phones and grocery store giveaway dish sets, to the cars, clothes and Gary Numan on the soundtrack. And yet, much of the anemic plot centers around a medical cannabis industry that wouldn’t exist for another three decades.
That leads to a central question around “Woodshock.” Is this all a dream? A bad drug trip? Or is it (my personal theory) a Willy Wonka-ian test by writer/directors Kate and Laura Mulleavy? Whichever one of their close friends has the honesty to tell them to their face that they didn’t enjoy the movie inherits their Rodarte clothing line fortune.
With that catty aside, let’s inventory what “Woodshock” does well. The entire film is a kaleidoscope of refracted light and warm tones in dark places, as if the whole film was shot in the glow of an enormous jukebox. Many of the key shots seem to take place at dawn or just after the magic hour at dusk, adding to a feeling of fleeting existence. The takeaway: Although you might never want to see the sisters write another movie, it’s believable they could capably direct one.
The first scene is the strongest, with Dunst as Theresa administering a fatal dose to her mother on her deathbed. From there, the audience’s connection with this character fades a little with each scene, as she exchanges weak greetings with her boyfriend, makes a horrible mistake at the cannabis shop, and then goes on increasingly hallucinatory drug trips in the Humboldt County woods — taking smaller doses of what she gave her mother.
There would be a growing tension in the film, if anything in “Woodshock” connected on a human level. One imagines that this is what filmmaking would look like after the end of an “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” movie, when all of the humans are gone and only the emotionless pods remain to green-light new projects.
Theresa throws out one unexplored line to her logging industry lover about the morality of killing trees. The theme of assisted suicide is recurrent. And yet nothing in this movie sticks. The writing is increasingly distant, while the characters become increasingly unsympathetic. Is Theresa just selfish? Clinically depressed? An exaggerated figment of someone else’s imagination?
The filmmakers offer very few clues, just more aqua filters and low-contrast visuals. And with each new jarring edit, the viewer cares less and less, until the 100 minutes seem to stretch on forever. Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle pop culture critic. Email: phartlaub@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub