We Wish You a White Christmas

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Did Krisha work for you? I know that Trey Edward Shults's low-simmering nightmare of hereditary pandemonium doesn't work for everybody, but Krisha worked for me, did it ever. And I found myself of Krisha often while I was watching Tyrel, writer-director Sebastián Silva's latest cinematic harangue. There's the same sense of invisible dread oozing from its pores - you don't know why you feel so on edge, moment to moment, but both movies make you feel as if your toes are inches over the cliff, full of needles, slipping fast.

Like he did with Nasty Baby Silva here tosses a group of ill-fitting young people on top of each other in a confined space (somehow Nasty Baby made all of Brooklyn seem claustrophobic) and watches them rub rub rub each other the wrong way, waiting for ignition. Tyler (a terrific Jason Mitchell) can't go home for Christmas, and so he goes to a secluded cabin in the woods with his friend Johnny (Christopher Abbott) to party with some of Johnny's friends. Tyler's not just the odd man out because everybody else knows each other - he's also the only black dude. And as the advertising for the film makes clear this Get Out situation is not just on the minds of us the audience, but on the minds of all the characters on-screen as well.

Because time and again, for no reason whatsoever, every character keeps bringing up race. Do they mean to? Are they trying to make him uncomfortable? Seemingly no it seems, but it slips out and slides around, covering everything, and there in lies the film's tension - how far are they going to take it? And how utterly exhausting is that tension for Tyler himself? (And should he go to a second location with Ann  Dowd? I hope we all know the answer to that one by now.)

Tyrel the film - which purposefully misspells the title character's name because that's the sort of thoughtless accident that piles up, one after another, in this movie - is relentless in situating the viewer in the headspace of anxious micro-aggression. We become one with Tyler, watching and waiting for every sneaky insinuation to fill in the blanks, and alongside him we grow perilously irritable. But for all this identification Silva allows Tyler, and Mitchell's performance, the room to press back - Tyler is a complicated unsaintly fella himself. And that cabin, right quick, is three sizes too small. Something's gonna bust. Welcome to 2018.
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Tyrel opens at the IFC Theater here in NY today.

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