Krisha
Written and Directed by Trey Edward Shults
Starring Krisha Fairchild, Alex Dobrenko and Robyn Fairchild
Running time 1 hour and 23 minutes
MPAA Rating R for language, substance abuse and some sexual content  

by Ryan Smillie

If you think about it, Thanksgiving is a pretty apt setting for a horror movie. Family members gathering - maybe even trapped - in one location, dormant conflicts lurking like ghosts, a sharp carving knife at the center of the table. In his 2014 debut feature, Krisha, Trey Edward Shults takes full advantage of these horror possibilities to transform what could be a usual family- and addiction-centered Thanksgiving drama into something both more menacing and more thoughtful.

The movie starts with former Dirty Projectors drummer Brian McOmber’s ominous score conjuring a pulsing, glitching heartbeat while a close up on the titular Krisha (played by Krisha Fairchild, Shults’s aunt) cuts to her pulling up to her sister’s house. We may not know exactly what’s about to happen, but Shults and McOmber signal from the very beginning that something is off about Krisha. There’s something disquieting about this thrumming music paired with Krisha’s seemingly standard “eccentric older aunt” attire. Her walk up to what turns out to be the wrong house starts to recall Michael Myers’s approach in the opening shots of John Carpenter’s Halloween.

Once Krisha gets to the right house, the expected sounds of a family holiday take on a sinister tone. The sounds of dogs barking, cousinly roughhousing, and rifling through cabinets combines with the still-pounding score to create a cacophony of relatively mundane sounds. Even the food preparation feels threatening, with a screaming blender, a knife slicing through onions and a laborious search for the giblets in the turkey. Cinematographer Drew Daniels captures this all with roving shots that spin through the house and build anxiety as they refuse to cut and disturbing close-ups that defamiliarize normal household sights.

Naturally, this sense of foreboding gives way to an explosive climax, but there’s nothing otherworldly about where Krisha goes. Its only demons are personal ones, grounding the film and maybe even making it scarier. As Krisha, Fairchild gives a performance that is both mesmerizing and breathtaking, a 21st century Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence. As she attempts to right past wrongs, her younger sister’s house seems to close in on her, pushing her towards the addictions she may or may not have kicked. When she reaches her breaking point and uncorks a bottle of wine with a pair of scissors (the red wine dripping down her arm like blood), she becomes “disaster incarnate,” just as her family had feared. She’s not only an estranged relative causing a scene at Thanksgiving dinner, but a monster in a haunted house.

The tropes of a horror movie give Shults an easy shorthand to explore the emotional reality of a family in crisis. Processing his own similar family tragedy, Shults creates a film that’s both filled with dread and incredibly sympathetic to its characters. In addition to Fairchild, the majority of the cast is made up of Shults’s family and friends (and Shults himself), and their real-life relationships contribute to a film that truly feels lived-in, even as it’s going off the rails. For anyone who’s ever thought that their family was a nightmare, Krisha is worth a watch. It is currently streaming on Kanopy and Netflix and On Demand on several platforms.