Paint It Black movie review & film summary (2017)
Whomever Josie may be as her own person is an unknown. Now, she's defined by her boyfriend's suicide, which she worries she might have caused in some way or another.
The other character is Michael's mother Meredith (Janet McTeer, deftly walking a fine line between realism and melodrama), a wealthy woman who lives in a grand mansion, where Josie and Michael had their first date by sneaking onto the grounds for a swim. She's a concert pianist, and within the expanse of the mansion's great hall, she pounds away at Rachmaninoff or sentimentally loses herself in Brahms—her son's favorite composer, thanks, in no small part, to her. Meredith's son was all she had, save for a career that put some distance between them and a family history of mental illness that she kept quiet—perhaps to the further destruction of her family.
Tamblyn alternately plays the resulting conflict between the two women as a thriller, in which Meredith seems prepared to ruin Josie's life (A stranger is watching the young woman from a distance, and there's an early threat that the mother could have the girlfriend "taken care of"), and as a piece of Gothic horror, in which Josie finds herself in that dark, dreary mansion and in the psychological clutches of a woman who wants to control everything. Even after Michael's death, Meredith still hasn't realized that she cannot. She definitely hasn't learned that there are consequences to trying.
Josie's experience is filtered through a series of daytime dreams and visions—of actual glimpses of the past and of uncertain events in the present. They're reflections of guilt, regret, and her deepest fears, presented with the logic of a dream and punctuated by Shawkat's performance, in which her face, full of despair and uncertainty, grounds those dreams in the reality of Josie's situation.
"Paint It Black" doesn't offer clear answers to Michael's suicide, because it's wise enough not to go looking for them. The film, a strong directorial debut from Tamblyn, is about living with the results, and it creates a waking nightmare of seemingly unresolvable pain and anguish. The question isn't why Michael killed himself. It's if the survivors will accept that as a simple but difficult fact.
