Ema

An interminable trainwreck, Ema follows Mariana Di Girolamo’s title character as she and her husband (Gael García Bernal’s Gastón) attempt to cope with a recent decision to give away a troublesome adopted child. It’s a reasonable premise that’s employed to entirely underwhelming and uninvolving effect by director Pablo Larraín, as the filmmaker, working from a script cowritten with Guillermo Calderón and Alejandro Moreno, delivers a time-shifting mess of a narrative that’s entirely lacking in an entry point for the viewer – with the aggressively arms-length atmosphere compounded by as one-dimensional and cipher-like a main character as one could possibly envision. Larraín’s admittedly strong eye for compelling visuals provides an all-too-brief respite from the otherwise terminally tedious proceedings, but it’s equally clear that the protagonists’ turmoil over what appears to be a psychotic little kid – he does, after all, murder a cat and set Ema’s sister on fire – makes absolutely no sense and is indicative of the production’s woefully misguided sensibilities. The end result is an ambitious misfire that certainly isn’t able to make the visceral impact Larraín is obviously striving for, and it’s impossible, ultimately, not to wonder what the director initially set out to achieve with this seemingly endless, aggressively avant-garde mess.

* out of ****