Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

[Watashi]

[Watashi]

Anyone seen this yet? Just got added to streaming. I know there is another film made about Christine Chubbuck from last year called Kate Plays Christine, but this one drew my attention first due to the talent involved.

The last 10 minutes is as intense as any thriller from last year and features yet another brilliant female performance of 2016. Rebecca Hall is outstanding. There's this odd flatness to her character that really adds to the abrasive distance she creates.

[Peng]

After being underwhelmed by Kate Plays Christine, I really like how this presents Christine Chubbuck as a full individual, each fragment of her person -- work, social, milieu, medical, interest, and so on -- given equal weight, so there is no direct mapping for anything as cause-and-effect to that decision. She was this person who did what she did, and there will always exist the unknowable to a person, that can at best be vaguely intuited, but never certain for sure. Antonio Campos and especially Rebecca Hall give the portrayal of Christine a tricky combination of specificity, honesty, and respect that both gives us a reason to continue watching while (mostly) keeps the potential ghoulish voyeurism at bay. 7.5/10

[Mal]

I found this to be kinda terrible. This was the longest two hour film I've seen in quite a while. Rebecca Hall is okay, if not totally one note, and the script never shows depth and agency beyond the frustrations between her and Tracy Letts. It just doesn't work, doesn't talk about Christine other than through the eyes of her coworkers and her doctor.