Sharp Corner: Drama Raises More Questions Than It Answers

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B-

There are some absorbing, uncomfortable ideas at play in Nova Scotia writer-director Jason Buxton’s Sharp Corner, which mines ethical ambiguities in its characters without feeling bound to resolve them. It’s conceptually unsettling and bold, but there are some hiccups with the execution.

The Canadian Irish co-production, which played TIFF last fall and was shot in Ontario and Nova Scotia, doesn’t quite seem to know what it wants to be. Is it a thriller? A psychological drama? Portrait of a dissolving marriage involving a possibly neurodivergent — but possibly mentally ill — individual?

A film could be all those things at once, of course, but it would need to follow a more persuasive path to build its case and advance its narrative. What’s here, while entertaining in its way, feels inconclusive as the filmmakers seek to build dread that never really coalesces into anything declarative.

Check out Bonnie Laufer’s interview with Sharp Corner director Jason Buxton

In Sharp Corner, marrieds Rachel and Josh (Cobie Smulders and Ben Foster) move from the city to the country with their young son Max (newcomer William Kosovic), settling into a sprawling house perched on the edge of a two-lane roadway marked by the titular sharp corner.

On their very first night, a car poorly navigating that corner has a horrendous accident outside their home, with the vehicle landing literally on their doorstep.

It is the first such harrowing incident by the couple’s house but not the last despite Josh’s initial efforts to clear brush obscuring a road sign warning of the curve. A roadside memorial for the victims of that first crash also points to danger.

If Rachel and Josh intuited the peril before moving in, they’re not letting on though the danger does seem to be a metaphor for something deeper within the relationship. As his marriage slowly comes unglued — ironically exacerbated by the move to the country which requires a long commute, forcing the costly purchase of a second car while enforcing distance from their city-dwelling friends — a slowly unraveling Josh becomes obsessed with the roadway.

So much so that he equips himself to deal with the accidents, taking CPR courses and practicing on plastic dummies or “Manikins” repeatedly. It is a skill that will eventually come in very handy, but the path to its use is dark and difficult to logically unpack against the film’s more prosaic elements, such as Josh’s eventual job loss and separation from Max.

Foster and Smulders are good actors and are palpably committed to the roles here. Foster exudes a convincing mix of forlorn, creepy, and confused, until he finally descends into… illness? Delusion? Evil? Revenge on an unforgiving world?

That vagueness deflates what might have been a genuine nail-biter, though Sharp Corner is elevated by Stephen McKeon’s dazzling score, which imbues the film with an appropriately eerie soundscape. The car crashes, too, are intense and white-knuckle.

All that said, I asked an esteemed fellow critic who had seen the film at TIFF for his opinion. He liked it and felt it was essential to see it on the big screen — and not via a screening link, as I had — to be fully engulfed by Josh’s weird, slowly deteriorating world. So yes, like all films, completely subjective. But for me at least, also distractingly unresolved.

Sharp Corner. Directed by Jason Buxton. Starring Ben Foster, Cobie Smulders, Gavin Drea, and William Kosovic. In theatres May 9.