2/28/21 - Two of Us (2020) - 8-/10
From the opening scene to the touching finale, this is love entwined with horror. It isn’t obliquely about terror, but the monster of secreted love, ravaging power of age, and the threat of the best in life being stripped from you permeates every ounce of the drama. This is not a horror film, but a bedevilling and bereaved tale of bound aged love.
Is often framed with a looming drama. Taught via social tragedy and a compositional eye. It is presented with a foreboding (from the tremendous metaphor of the 2 little girls playing hide and seek, counting down to find each other, but the secret remains hidden as one girl's voice is replaced by the squawking of crows). Another darkly whimsical juncture is the girl drowning in the river. Is that one of them? Is it something darker? Is it metaphorical and significant when Nina saves her? Is it Madeleine’s drowning in her matrimony?
Horror filled or not, the pain of losing your loved one while they are still there is terrorizing. It is doubled with the necessity for silence; a relationship that is hidden for fear of what its exposure might mean for those around them. This crippling pain on the precipice of loss is paramount in Barbara Sukowa’s acting and the stifled crippling with Martine Chevallier.
It’s marvelously constructed. The shots and editing are superb & evocative, both outright and subliminal. I was truly was sucked in and gripped. It builds fantastically and leaves you in that terse middle ground of elation and demolition. This is an elegant and somber triumph, like so many melancholic French masterpieces before it.
