Black Bear review: Aubrey Plaza is untethered and ferocious

A comedy-drama dunked in acid, the film allows the boundaries between life and art to melt in the most exquisitely torturous ways

Dir: Lawrence Michael Levine. Starring: Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott, Sarah Gadon, Paola Lázaro, Grantham Coleman. 15, 105 mins

Black Bear opens on a woman in a red bathing suit. She’s sitting by the lake, her knees pulled up so tight that she resembles a lump of untouched clay. Her features lie perfectly still – it’s the face of Aubrey Plaza, an actor known for her unshakable deadpan. A moment passes. She gets up and heads inside the nearby cabin, placing herself down in front of a notebook and setting pen to paper. From this point on, Black Bear screams into life. A comedy-drama dunked in acid, it allows the boundaries between life and art to melt in the most exquisitely torturous ways.

A scene of sexual chaos plays out between three characters: Plaza’s Allison, Christopher Abbott’s Gabe, and Sarah Gadon’s Blair. Then the narrative resets. A few things are the same; much more has changed. At no point does writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine indicate what may be truth and what may be the story flowing from Allison’s pen. The effect is hypnotic – immersive to the point of claustrophobia. Early on, it’s clear that Allison is an impulsive storyteller, even when it’s merely spooling out inside her head.

In the first chapter, she arrives to Gabe and Blair’s cabin as part of an artist’s retreat and immediately treats the situation like a game. She fishes for compliments, then rejects them. The couple keep asking after a husband that she insists she doesn’t have. Plaza, in these scenes, toys with the aloof, acerbic image she cultivated on TV’s Parks and Recreation. “You're really hard to read,” Blair tells her. Allison retorts that she’s actually far too easy to read – it comes across as pure provocation.

She’s crash-landed into an already deeply fractured relationship. Gabe and Blair communicate purely through contradictions. Gabe is particularly offended when his partner describes him as a former (and not current) musician, while the pregnant Blair keeps feverishly reaching for the wine bottle. Abbott and Gadon both tear into Levine’s script. These are frightening, ugly performances. Giulio Carmassi and Bryan Scary’s score has all the throbbing tension of a horror film – and Black Bear is a horror, to the extent that no one wants to be trapped in a remote cabin with three profoundly unlikeable people.

‘Black Bear’ opens on a woman (Aubrey Plaza) in a red bathing suit. She’s sat by the lake, her knees pulled up so tight that she resembles a lump of untouched clay. (Vertigo Releasing)

They all butt heads until the inevitable point of explosion. And Levine plays a grand trick here by not allowing any sense of relief in the aftermath. Instead, we’re presented with an even more frantic second chapter, where the camera detaches itself and starts to roam in pure John Cassavetes style. Plaza herself transforms into something more untethered and ferocious than ever before, playing an actor viciously manipulated by her director in the pursuit of authentic emotion.

There are no borders to her pain. She contorts and screams and cackles with delirium. It’s like an oil spill that seeps through each scene, to the point that we lose all concept of truth versus performance. At all times, somewhere in the trees, that bear lies ready to swipe its claws and dig its teeth into flesh. Its presence may be physical, but its purpose is entirely metaphorical. In Black Bear, to suffer for one’s art is to invite total self-obliteration. And Levine has invited us right into the heart of that nightmare.