Thanks to the unique gifts of Aubrey Plaza, writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine’s dark comedy Black Bear is a cauldron of surprises. This is an edge-of-the-seat movie where you cannot predict what is going to happen next – or at least how it is going to happen.
At first, Black Bear seems like a dark comedy of manners. And then there’s a complete reset. In a movie-within-a-movie, the tone goes from broadly comic to nail-biting, with a satisfying final payoff about the creative process. I’m not going to spoil the story by getting anymore explicit about the its construction – but the audience needs to be a bit nimble.
As Levine unspools his story, reels it back in and unspools it again, Black Bear is a roller coaster. As Sheila O’Malley writes, “This is a disturbing film, and much of it is unpleasant, but it’s also very, very funny.“
Plaza plays Allison, a film writer-director who becomes the only guest at a woodsy lakeside B&B owned by (Gabe) Christopher Abbott and (Blair) Sarah Gadon. Allison is isolating to work on writer’s block, but she soon becomes absorbed by Gabe and Blair, a couple whose unnecessary bickering signals that they are on each other’s very last nerve. Two of the characters tell significant lies, and why they lie is revealing about each of them.
As to Allison, from her first kinda-flirty-but-with-sharper-elbows banter, you can tell she’s trouble. Plaza excels in playing a character who is hiding her acidly judgy thoughts with a mask of deadpan social almost-appropriateness. Mick LaSalle describes Plaza thusly: “This is someone who has made her name in comedies, but whose distinct quality — a certain unknowability, a certain watchfulness, a certain suggestion of some underlying hostility — always seemed like it would lend itself to drama, at least theoretically.”
Blair (exasperated): You’re really hard to read.
Allison (brightly): I get that a lot.
The playwright Paola Lázaro is especially good as the harried AD trying to hold it together as shooting the last scene of the film-within-the-film becomes ever more imperiled. There’s also a very funny running joke about script supervisor who doesn’t grasp the concept of you have one job.
When you watch Black Bear, keep one thing in mind – Allison is trying to devise a story for her next film.
Black Bear is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.