While watching Jason Buxton’s dark sinister genuinely daunting drama about a dangerous accident-prone U-Turn, I suddenly thought of Gulzar’s lyrics Kiss mod se jaate hain kuch sust qadam raste, kuch tez kadan raahen…
Of course, Gulzar meant the ‘mod’ (turning) in a more metaphorical mode. The corner in Jason Buxton’s thriller is a real physical place where cars are prone to swerve skid and crash. Living on the other side of the road is the newly acquired residence of Josh McCall (Ben Foster) his wife Rachel (Cobie Smulders)and their son Max (William Kosovic).
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The first crash happens on the first night in their new home: a car screeches skids and explodes, and a tyre flies through the glass window of McCalls’ posh new residence.
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Shouldn’t the traumatized family have moved right out of that dangerous home? What are the forces that impel us on the path of self-destruction? The psychological aftermath of a looming catastrophe are described in vivid, disturbing detail, as Josh changes and destructs right in front of our eyes.
There have been many films describing the cataclysmic transformation of the protagonist—Jack Nicholson in The Shining comes to mind immediately. But none so gravely inward-drawn and subtle in his transformative journey from a loving husband and father to man obsessed with the cars that crash outside his window.
“You want them to happen,” Josh’s wife accuses him, and she is not entirely wrong. He wants the accidents to happen so he can test his newly-acquired skills at saving lives.
It’s a bizarre near-deathwish where you hope to see people struggling for their lives, only so you can step in. Ben Foster, an actor of curious skills, gets into the skin of Josh’s spiral with a stealth that is creepy in its lack of affectation. There is, what’s the word for it, an inevitability to Foster’s performance that makes his character’s horrific down spiral seem dreadfully unplanned.
Jason Buxton’s narrative works best within Josh’s ill-omened home, where he blossoms as a borderline lunatic obsessing over whose car will crash in his front yard next, even shifting the warning sign at the calamitous corner to facilitate the crash.
All this sounds horribly improper, if not crazily kinky. And yet the mechanics of the human mind cannot be explained easily, not all the time. Thanks to Ben Foster’s immensely immersive performance Sharp Corner takes us through the experience of watching a family man implode into something quite the opposite.