Toronto 2024 Review: SHARP CORNER, Emasculated Ben Foster Goes to Dark Places

There is a railroad trestle over Gregson Street in Durham, North Carolina, that is a bit lower than it should be.

 

In spite of flashing lights and a few signs, several times a month a cube van or tractor trailer will peel their own roof off by rushing underneath. Some of the nearby residents have dealt with this 11 foot 8 bridge using an activist sense of humour. By placing a camera there and posting the carnage on YouTube, this satiric bit of civic duty got the bridge raised a few additional inches. The occasional truck still ‘executes a sweet peel,’ but then perfect can be the enemy of good sometimes. 

 

What might have been a pragmatic Canadian approach to a similar road problem, Sharp Corner instead works as a double entendre for both the literal road featured, as well as the relationships within the story, the twists and turns the characters undergo from vehicular and domestic trauma from a series of gruesome car crashes that end up burning on their rural front lawn due to the tight curvature of the road.

Character studies of seemingly normal Canadians, but with morally ambiguous head-spaces, was a short-lived trend in Canadian cinema at the end of the previous century; think David Wellington’s I Love A Man in Uniform, Robert LaPage’s Possible Worlds, Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed or Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter. These challenging films, after a trip across the Canadian festival circuit, a few Genie Awards tossed their way, and tiny domestic theatrical runs, would eventually end up as surprise staples of FirstChoice-Superchannel, Canada’s HBO at the time.

If Sharp Corner were cast from that specific moment, I have no doubt that it would star Tom McCamus and Molly Parker. However, I suspect the current content delivery system, algorithm recommended streaming services, will probably not yield the same out-of-the-blue impact of getting ensnared by something surprisingly complex and disturbing while channel-hopping late at night.

 

Josh and Rachel have just purchased their dream-home outside of Halifax. In the quiet Nova Scotia countryside, they plan to relax, fix up their new home, and commute into their day jobs. Their 6-year-old son Max will have space to roam freely. Their planned renovations to modernize the place (also turning a house into their home) are a bit daunting, but also brimming with opportunity.

 

On their first night, a car tire smashes through the living window, there are gruesome deaths on their front lawn, and Max is freaked out by the noise. This immediately raises the question: fix the problem or move?

 

The couple cannot agree on an answer to this problem, or even what problem on which to focus. Try to keep their son innocent by not having him play outside, have the city put guard rails, or just live with it? The post-traumatic stress of the carnage, which happens again, begins to derail their marriage, as Josh pours his focus into learning CPR, becoming a kind of neighbourhood hero when the next accident will inevitable occur.



 

Sharp Corner takes a less travelled path, eschewing issue-oriented movie-of-the-week or pragmatic justice. It pursues a commentary on masculinity and emasculation, through the observation of a passive and dishonest man, who genuinely wants to be the good husband and good father, but seems to lack the toolset or the capacity to do so. 



Ben Foster has enjoyed a lengthy career playing tightly-wound, action-oriented characters, but here as Josh, he is unassertive, often stewing in a kind of flailing denial. His internal conflict finds disturbing off ramps into the external world. I got the sense that his wife has known about his issues for years, and despite being a therapist by trade, is not willing to talk about it. She instead sends Josh to a therapist, a male colleague of hers for private sessions that start to more resemble detention than therapy.

A strength of the film is that while Rachel is proven right, her approach to some sort of domestic solution is also fraught with failure and coping blindness. Cobie Smulders has much less screen time to accomplish this than Foster, who gets the lion's share, but she does the best she can with the time she has. To her credit, she never makes her own character sympathetic or likeable.

 

That is a very interesting choice. The film also implies further things along the way, with Rachel and Max, but for the most part lets the viewer do some of the work if they choose to look just beyond the frame. I appreciated this. 

The home itself is eventually 'renovated' from a warm and inviting deep beiges, to a kind of institutional blue as the marriage slips over the edge of the abyss, and Josh obsesses over the exact way to do CPR compressions with an expensive training dummy. 

By pushing some pretty heavy-handed buttons, albeit with intentionality and precision, the film considers difficult ideas about male roles, and role models, in Western societies at our current moment. The effect, or cost, when such masculine things are increasingly sidelined, often vilified by default, and even stamped out altogether; the baby with the bathwater, and all that. 

In some ways, Sharp Corner is a kind of minor-key Canadian answer to Falling Down. The Joel Schumacher movie from the early 1990s starring Micheal Douglas was far more bombastic and painted on a much bigger L.A. canvas than inland rural Nova Scotia, but both films share a main character that finds themselves in a twisted, satirically heroic sense of purpose.

 

Their method of reacting to, and dealing decisively with, society's problems creates as many new ones as it purports to solve. All the while onlookers (that includes us) become aghast with vigilante notions of testosterone heavy rage and ego masquerading as justice. Your mileage may vary, but Sharp Corner has the uncommon good sense to drive its point home slowly, and with purpose.