Review: Clementine Wrings Exquisite Tension from Shifting Power Dynamics

Writer-director Lara Jean Gallagher’s Clementine begins with arguably its only moment of true calm: a POV shot of a woman, D. (Sonya Walger), lying in bed whispering sweet nothings to her girlfriend, Karen (Otmara Marrero), who smiles as the first rays of morning light beam into their room. Then, the film jumps forward in time to Karen returning to their home to find that the locks have been changed, and one look at the young woman’s miserable face says everything about how one-sided their breakup was.

Desperate to cling to what they once had together, Karen drives out to D.’s lake house in the Pacific Northwest and breaks into the place. And it’s there that she meets Lana (Sydney Sweeney), a teenager stalking the grounds ostensibly looking for her lost dog. Lana has a spacey look in her eyes and a certain sweet detachment in her speech, and soon they bond over their shared transgression—of having intruded into D.’s private space. Though D. is heard and not seen for most of Clementine, one can easily intuit that she’s much older than Karen, and as such there’s a sense that Karen is subconsciously using her budding friendship with Lana to explore the dynamic of being the older, more secure person in a relationship. And there are moments in Gallagher’s film where Karen regards Lana’s youth with amusement, as when the girl goes to use D.’s record player but gazes back at Karen with helpless confusion.

Just as odd as Karen and Lana’s rapidly escalating closeness are the mocking phone calls that Karen gets from D., who allows her to stay at the house because “I like to know where you are.” All the while, Gallagher heightens the film’s persistent unease with angular compositions that make D.’s idyllic cabin seem like a forbidding modernist structure, cranking up the claustrophobia of its open spaces. Arrhythmic editing further scrambles the tone of the film, as some shots drag on a few beats too long, while others leap over actions that Clementine seemed to be building up as potentially important. Marrero and Sweeney reflect these odd cadences in their performances, alternately falling silent or jumping ahead in conversations that give the impression of Karen and Lana both sizing up and manipulating each other.

There’s a hint of Jane Campion’s own uncanny perversion of the banal throughout the film; an early shot of Karen urinating on the side of the road finds the camera following the urine puddle as it slowly spreads diagonally on the ground, recalling a similar moment from Peel, Campion’s 1982 breakthrough short. In many ways, Clementine feels like a psychological thriller stripped of catharsis, given how it rouses a sense of omnipresent anxiety.

Gallagher’s mastery of form helps overcome some deficiencies in the drama, most of which come across as obvious attempts to inject urgency into a film that’s more than successful at summoning dread by simply holding us in a state of languid idleness. The occasional intrusion of a local handyman, Beau (Will Brittain), rather simplistically triggers a protective and possessive streak in Karen toward Lana, while an anticlimactic reveal of some of the lies at the heart of Karen and Lana’s relationship makes too obvious what was already evocatively implied. These cliché moments stand out in a film that’s otherwise admirably free of them, but with Clementine, Gallagher nonetheless shows herself to be every bit as adept as Josephine Decker and the Safdie brothers are at wringing unease from the most mundane of scenarios.