Canary

Last year, I wrote about Alejandro Adams's terrific film Around the Bay. I am glad to say he is back with an even better film, full of wonder and menace, entitled Canary. The plot revolves around a company--Canary Industries--that is in the "organ donor business," a description that barely gets at the horror of what they do, which includes repossessing transplanted organs from people who don't take proper care of them. How the film manages to convey the full terror of this without actually splattering any blood anywhere is a feat I'm still trying to figure out. I should say also that Jarrod Whaley has a very good discussion of the film over at Oak Street Films.

Canary is one of those rare movies where content and form come together so perfectly, so beautifully, that they can't really be separated. The acting so natural and realistic that the film almost takes on the aura of dystopian documentary. Lots of the camera work is hand-held, but not in a self-conscious way: the fluid movement suggests the terrible ease by which the silent Carla--an organ reposessor from Canary--moves throughout peoples' lives doing terrible things so quietly. Wearing a white jump suit with the a Canary logo throughout the film, she remains invisible to people--in their homes, apartments, back yards--observing them silently before they end up drugged in her van, awaiting the organ removal that is never shown on camera. Adams's decision to show the preparation for the procedure but not the procedure itself makes all the difference: our imaginations conjure the worst.

Canary is suffused with texture and sound: the small hands of children drawing or playing with objects suggests the slow, deliberate process by which Carla cleans and prepares her dark materials. In one of the film's most darkly funny and unsettling scenes, a brainstorming session at an ad agency for Canary Industries is like a scene from The Office gone down the rabbit hole. "Our goal here," one of the executives says, "is to make them [Canary] the Coke of organ redistribution." 

Carla haunts the film, and is present in almost every scene, sometimes in the background, or around the edges, or outside of a window, waiting and watching and listening. We can't help but identify with her, share her point of view. We become complicit in her monstrous actions, even as she is only a small player, a pawn, in the elusive and off-camera Canary Industries. Canary is a film of restraint, yet somehow more powerful and disturbing than big dystopian films like The Dark Knight, which finally collapses into absurdity under the weight of Its Own Importance.

Like the best "little" films, Canary is a very big film. And like the best films of the French New Wave or the Dogme 95 movement, it shatters distinctions between the mainstream and the avant-garde. Which is to say: it is a film to be reckoned with, to be savored, and not to be forgotten.

A few stills:

Comments

[Jarrod Whaley]

This is a very considered (and yet accessible) review, Mr. Rombes.

And thanks, by the way, for linking to my own review of the film.

[Liz Hand]

Sounds like a great movie — I'll definitely check it out. Have you read M. John Harrison's novel Signs of novels of the 1990s, it has a Life? One of the best (and most underrated) near-future setting and a subplot involving black market organ transport. Not similar to Canary, but you might enjoy it.

[Liz Hand]

Oops -- that got intriguingly scrambled in posting. MJH novel is titled 'Signs of Life.'