Murmur (Heather Young, 2019) (Patreon)

Debut films are often tricky melanges of shopworn cliches and the unique ideas that made the artist want to make the movie in the first place. It's almost as though, in trying to figure out how to give shape to those inchoate sounds and images rattling around in their heads, novice filmmakers instinctively fall back on simple formal containers. This approach also has the added benefit of serving as a Janus-faced calling card, since at this stage in one's career it's uncertain whether one will be an art-film auteur or a hired gun for Netflix. "I can do this, and I can do that."

Murmur is a film anchored by an achingly evocative performance by Shan MacDonald, an unprofessional actor in her debut role. This is a portrait of her character, Donna, a middle-aged alcoholic on probation for a DUI who is doing mandatory community service at an animal shelter. In her slightly distanced responses to banal questions, her too-enthusiastic front of peppy optimism, her defeatist attitude toward the physical therapy that could save her from the heart murmur that threatens her life, MacDonald embodies Donna as a weary, beaten soul, someone who hasn't yet realized that she is in fact estranged from her adult daughter and that isn't ever going to change. This is a woman we have all seen in the supermarket, in the hospital waiting room, at Denny's, or in the back row of an AA meeting.

Young attempts to organize a plot around her, one that involves Donna replacing one addition for another. After adopting an old, sickly dog from the shelter, she begins hoarding animals, her apartment becoming a menagerie filled with matted hair, kibble, and shit. Murmur is a bit too abbreviated to make this development ring true, so it seems like a cinematic convenience, one that disrupts the integrity of MacDonald's performance. 

This, combined with a number of other rookie errors -- both Donna and her dog have heart murmurs; Young cuts from Donna and others doing circular arm repetitions at p.t. to a hamster on its exercise wheel -- undercut the character study that is at the heart of the film. And while Young's incorporation of documentary material from actual veterinary procedures is a smart idea in theory, it doesn't really add very much to Murmur. Or rather, it suggests another kind of film Young could have made, or perhaps thought she was making, but that the final effort is not.