ArcaMax

Down here south of the border, Canada is often coded as mild-mannered and bland. But look closely beneath the surface of such choice Canadian films as David Cronenberg's "Videodrome" or Atom Egoyan's "Chloe" and you find dark things squirming around. Jason Buxton's "Sharp Corner" is very much this sort of picture. It begins high in a sunny sky looking down at a forest road along which a small car is making its way. Even after we meet the car's three passengers -- Josh McCall (Ben Foster), a soft-spoken, khaki-clad tech exec; his more assertive wife, Rachel (Cobie Smulders), a psychotherapist; and six-year-old Max (William Kosovic), their kid -- we notice nothing amiss, or even very interesting, about them. But soon darkness starts to gather, and before long a story that has started out in the unexciting suburbs of Toronto takes a left turn into Hell.

Buxton's movie doesn't batter us with shocks; it's largely quiet and understated. Which makes it tricky to put a finger on the source of the muddled feelings that course through it. The picture is another tidy triumph for Ben Foster, who's been a memorable screen presence for the last 20 years in movies like "Alpha Dog" (2006), "Leave No Trace" (2018) and "Hell or High Water" (2016). Here, playing a character whose personality is next door to dull (his little mustache is a virtual emblem of runaway niceness and masculine insufficiency), he makes even the faintest of Josh's occasional tremors of pain or displeasure fully felt.

As soon as the McCalls arrive at the cozy new woodland home they've purchased, far from their noisy old urban life, we see there's something very wrong with them. Or with Josh, anyway. True, it's not his fault that while he and Rachel are having a connubial shag on the living room floor a crash should be heard outside and a freewheeling tire should come sailing through the window. And he's clearly not responsible for the dead teenage driver in the mangled wreckage still smoking out on the lawn. There's a wickedly sharp corner turn in the road that runs past the front of the house that, Rachel now realizes, must be why the place sat on the market for many months unsold.

But Josh is oddly energized by this gruesome automotive calamity. Clicking around online he finds home videos of the now-departed teen, and before long he has cobbled together a secondhand bio to relate to some friends he and Rachel have over for dinner one night. ("You were like a vulture," she tells him afterward, irritated by this creepy new wrinkle in her husband's otherwise closeted personality.) Unfazed, he signs up for a local life-saving course and purchases a paramedic manikin on which to practice emergency resuscitation. His life is falling apart -- it looks like he's about to lose his job, and maybe even his family -- and he becomes desperate to be of some use to somebody. When another car crashes outside, and its driver expires while looking straight into Josh's eyes, it seems to push him over the edge. But the edge of what?

The movie never lets us entirely in on the cause of Josh's inner chaos. Even the shrink he sees at one point can't get a handle on it. The fact that director Buxton, working from a short story by Russell Wangersky, refrains from imposing resolution at the end of the film is a disappointment. Until that point, though, he and Foster catch us up in a serious case of the creeps.

========

To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

Copyright 2025 Creators Syndicate, Inc.