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Watched online. After Midnight Special and The Shape of Water, this was another movie co-starring Michael Shannon, this time with Shea Whigham, and seems to have been pitched as “Shannon and Whigham glare suspiciously at each other for two hours,” which is not quite the case— there’s more suspicion (Shannon) and conscience-stricken anxiety (Whigham) than open glaring.
Whigham plays “the Man,” a fugitive who kills a preacher travelling to his new assignment in the tiny West Texas town of Bevel, then takes his identity. This isn’t a spoiler, it’s the starting premise. Shannon is the local police chief who thinks the new preacher is a bit weird, but who doesn’t really pay any attention until a hastily-hidden body turns up in the titular quarry. They’re both great, in a very low-key way, and so are the rest of the cast, especially Catalina Sandino Moreno as the new preacher’s landlady who is sleeping with the police chief and is also the cousin of the two drug-dealing brothers (Bobby Soto and Alvaro Martinez) whom the chief thinks did the murder (Bevel is a really small town).
It was the ending that dissatisfied me; thinking it over, my objection is that the chief disappears from the narrative about ten minutes from the end, and is conspicuously absent while everyone else’s story gets wrapped up. Not that his story has to be— in a movie so unabashedly laden with symbolism, I think it’s possible to go for a metaphysical reading in which Bevel is some kind of weird Purgatory where the chief remains trapped while the other characters, one way or another, eventually depart— but I’d still like a definitive final scene of him reacting to the events that have happened.
So, 8/10: great cast, beautifully shot, but didn’t stick the landing for me. YMMV, of course.
Whigham plays “the Man,” a fugitive who kills a preacher travelling to his new assignment in the tiny West Texas town of Bevel, then takes his identity. This isn’t a spoiler, it’s the starting premise. Shannon is the local police chief who thinks the new preacher is a bit weird, but who doesn’t really pay any attention until a hastily-hidden body turns up in the titular quarry. They’re both great, in a very low-key way, and so are the rest of the cast, especially Catalina Sandino Moreno as the new preacher’s landlady who is sleeping with the police chief and is also the cousin of the two drug-dealing brothers (Bobby Soto and Alvaro Martinez) whom the chief thinks did the murder (Bevel is a really small town).
It was the ending that dissatisfied me; thinking it over, my objection is that the chief disappears from the narrative about ten minutes from the end, and is conspicuously absent while everyone else’s story gets wrapped up. Not that his story has to be— in a movie so unabashedly laden with symbolism, I think it’s possible to go for a metaphysical reading in which Bevel is some kind of weird Purgatory where the chief remains trapped while the other characters, one way or another, eventually depart— but I’d still like a definitive final scene of him reacting to the events that have happened.
So, 8/10: great cast, beautifully shot, but didn’t stick the landing for me. YMMV, of course.
