Krisha

Brash yet intimate, writer/director/editor Trey Edward Shults' observant, unnerving first feature transcends the notion of a "promising debut." Here, the promise is already fulfilled on the screen, which bustles with chaotic family life -- and prickles with anxiety. Krisha is a heartsick family story that plays as psychological horror, its themes of estrangement and addiction juiced at every moment by Shults' vigorous -- even pushy -- expressionism. Steel yourself for wheeling terror as sixty-something Krisha (Krisha Fairchild), visiting her sister's home for her first holiday get-together in who knows how long, walks in furious circles in the kitchen as the turkey entrusted to her roasts and she discovers that the timer has gone missing. The camera spins, of course, just as it zips across the floor in dog's-eye zooms, or, later, tracks slowly down a too-narrow hallway bedecked in photos of relatives and edged with the darkest of darkness.

This young maximalist is committed at each moment to the extremes of everyday feeling, to lighting in you the conflagration already raging in his troubled heroine. Shults dares to exhaust, to overwhelm, to upset. The amateur cast, Shults' own friends and family, ranges from convincing (the blithe, brawling teen boys) to hilarious (Chris Doubek as Krisha's cranky doctor brother-in-law) to extraordinary (Krisha and Robyn Fairchild, Shults' aunt and mother, real sisters acing big, teary scenes). Shults (who plays a small key role himself) filmed Krisha over nine days in his mother's house, and he's packed it and his frame with raw life suggestive of Cassavetes.