My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?

Michael Shannon’s psycho, in flashback stories that do less to explain his character or his crime than present docu-tableaux of stand-out otherworldliness – spends the whole film presenting himself and his understanding of the world as something totally unrelatable to normal human beings. Holed up in his mother’s flamingo-pink suburban house and surrounded by cops, everything associated with this man – and especially his trips, filmed in beautifully inconsistent DV, to Mexico, China, and Peru – exist on a plane completely incomprehensible and out of context with our modern lives. Aguirre or Woyzeck, born today in a San Diego suburb with an overbearing mother: what kind of madness would his truth end up sounding and looking like? (Daniel Kasman; The Auteurs)