Stream It Or Skip It?

Looks like Sharp Corner (now streaming on Hulu) might just lodge itself in the Ben Foster top three, next to Hell or High Water and Leave No Trace. The underrated actor here enjoys a compelling dramatic/dark comic vehicle, playing a Ned Flandersish (mustache-wise, not Christianity-wise) nebbish who moves his family into their dream house, only to learn that the property sits adjacent to a tight turn that often results in fatal car wrecks in the front yard. The film has bubbled imperceptibly under the radar despite earning Foster some of the best reviews of his career – and here’s why you should overlook it no more.

The Gist: This home, it’s MOVE-IN READY. Beautiful bay windows, open-space layout, large lot nestled into the peaceful countryside. For a family of three weary of bumping elbows and heads all the time in The City, it’s perfect. Josh (Foster) has an office gig at a tech company, Rachel (Cobie Smulders) is a psychotherapist and their boy Max (William Kosovic) is a sweet six-year-old. “We’re commuters now,” Josh explains to Max. America! Their first night in the new house, they have a wholesome spaghetti dinner and Max goes to bed and Josh and Rachel break in the floor of the living room with some sexytime that’s disrupted by a horrible screech and a crash and the wheel of an automobile smashing through the window and bouncing by their naked butts. Coitus interruptus is rarely so dramatic. 

And so the McCall family property has officially hosted its first fatality. Perhaps it’s an omen.  Josh and Rache – he calls her “Rache,” with a hard ch sound – try to protect their kid’s fragile young psyche from the horror, which results in Josh freaking out when he finds Max innocently playing outside in the tracks left in the yard by a car belonging to a teenage boy who’s now memorialized at the curve with a wooden cross, photos and a beloved football. They attempt to get on with their daily lives, but if they successfully achieved that, there wouldn’t be much drama in this movie. Josh goes to work and struggles to focus on the “RTM procurement project” (yes, ugh city) then goes home to reseed the lawn and trim the shrubbery that’s obscuring the big yellow sign with the arrow on it. That’s got to be the issue here. Problem solved! THE END.

But no! Josh can’t sit in his own house without the sound of every passing car igniting his anxiety. One night Rache very effectively removes moisture from lettuce using a salad spinner while Josh grills the burgers on the patio when there’s another horrific crash. When Josh runs out front, all he can do is watch helplessly – total beta move, bro – as one of the drivers croaks, eyes wide open. Josh responds by taking CPR classes, and so begins his Eccentric Behavior, which involves buying CPR dummies and hiding them from Rache, and being so distracted/obsessed that he treads hot water at work for losing clients and blowing past deadlines. Rache wants to cut bait and move out of Deathton Abbey, which is only logical, but Josh? “I thought this was our dream house,” he says, completely ignoring the fact that we’ve seen multiple scenes in which the occupants of said house washed dishes by hand. A dream house? With no dishwasher? My ass!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Haven’t seen this type of doll obsession from a guy with a goofy mustache since Lars and the Real Girl. So cross that with real-estate-regret comedy The Money Pit and David Cronenberg’s Crash and you’ve got yourself this odd little picture. 

Performance Worth Watching: Foster is slightly cartoonish at times, but he wisely underplays the frustrated-male/wannabe-alpha elements of the character. He aims for provocative ambiguity and subtle comedy, and hits the mark. 

Memorable Dialogue: Josh tries to buy a CPR doll from the class instructor, and gets rebuffed: “It’s part of a set – a family of four!”

Sex and Skin: Foster and Smulders’ bare bums in a very suburban-boring sex scene.

Our Take: The movie may be titled Sharp Corner, but we meet Josh in the midst of a long-developing gradual arc that has routinely questioned his ideas about masculinity and purpose. His younger trainee at work got a promotion, and Rachel passive-aggressively notes his lack of ambition. And note, during the sex scene, she apparently isn’t satisfied and therefore insists she get on top – and we can’t help but chuckle that in a moment where nobody’s wearing pants, she very clearly wears them around here. And Josh isn’t happy about that, although he’d be hard-pressed to share his feelings about it, caught as he is in the pincer-grip of expectations and realities of what Being A Man truly means. 

And so Josh’s long-squashed frustrations manifest in his unhealthy obsession with saving the life of the next front-yard accident victim, emerging like the excess Play-Doh squirting from the seams of a Drill ‘n Fill playset. Foster’s goofy, pinched vocal affectation nudges the tone toward satire – we just can’t take a character with such a voice too seriously – so we’re confronted with the queasy horror-movie notion that we actually want another nasty car wreck to occur, just to see how Josh reacts to it. This, in spite of our concern for Rachel and poor little Max, the well-adjusted people privy to his unsettling behavior. Oh, and we also empathize with Josh after they move out and she rightly limits his ability to see Max; remember, wackjobs with control issues (or lack-of-control issues) and creepy obsessions are perfectly capable of loving their offspring, too. Then again, he could warp the poor kid. This movie really twists you around.

Writer/director Jason Buxton subtly escalates the drama by essentially training us to perk up and analyze the sound of every car that passes the McCall family’s house. The filmmaker shows a keen eye for setting as well, establishing the home and the treacherous curve in the road with dynamic angles that frame our troubled protagonist within a place that seems beautiful at first blush but is ultimately cursed. Smarter still is how Buxton passes no judgment on his characters, letting Josh exist in a moral gray zone, leaving us curious about exactly how he came to be this odd person in this odd moment. Sharp Corner is weird and provocative and unapologetic in its insistence that there are no simple answers to Josh’s psychological conundrum. 

Our Call: I interpret the lack of a dishwasher as the most ominous omen in this story. Details matter! STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.