A Bitter Fruit
2020 · 10m · USA
Directed by Ryan Weatrowski
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Two orphaned sisters drift through their isolated desert home, the same one where their parents ended each other in a murder-suicide. Quiet, sun-bleached, haunted by absence rather than ghosts.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Sister-grief in the desert could be a Sundance cliche, but the casting choice alone — Pejic in a mourning two-hander — pulls it sideways. Worth a look for the texture if nothing else.
Andreja Pejic's face used as landscape rather than celebrity hook — Weatrowski's sun-bleached desert grief is Virgin Suicides relocated to Sam Shepard, which is a defensible thesis. Hushed, not vacant.
Sun-bleached desert grief haunted by absence rather than ghosts, with Andreja Pejic's face used as landscape rather than celebrity hook — that's the right register for a murder-suicide aftermath. Quiet and load-bearing.