In the Flesh: Sun Don't Shine (Patreon)

The unspoken punchline of every “Florida Man” joke and public interest story about a gator snatching someone’s miniature poodle is that Florida is a shithole, a federally neglected state hacked up into political incoherence by centuries of gerrymandering and plagued by police violence, inadequate infrastructure, and the property-hoarding, union-busting corporate might of the Walt Disney Corporation. That poverty and pointless, clawing immiseration is everywhere in Amy Seimetz’s Sun Don’t Shine, a film about damaged, beady-eyed bar waitress Crystal (Kate Lyn Sheil) and dully chickenshit carpenter Leo (Kentucker Audley) racing across Florida to dump the corpse of Crystal’s murdered husband in the Everglades. Sheil in particular channels the vicious cycle of exploitation and abuse to such electrifying, abrasive effect that at times she’s almost unwatchable, a black hole sucking the life out of everything around her by sheer dint of her inability to experience security or joy.

It would be simplicity itself to villainize Crystal, a none-too-bright murderer unable to stop herself from erupting into petulant hysterics over every conceivable thing, but Seimetz takes a much subtler and more human approach. Seimetz shoots Crystal with a kind of pouty adolescent emotional stuntedness, her body long and toneless, her face made to appear wider and less definite by thoughtful application of matte foundation. Even her voice is childish, thin and whining, pitch rising to a tooth-grinding squeal like the sound of a mosquito doppler-ing past your ear. Anxiety controls her almost completely. She clutches for any feeling of safety of certainty, pushing and testing, subsiding into pitch-black catastrophization at the drop of a hat. Her flat, dead-eyed declaration that Leo must hate her body and wish it were different forms the beginning of a kind of bizarre one-sided fight that seems almost like an attempt to force her anxiety to assume a definite form, one she can combat. She selects an avatar for it and then insists that avatar is real. It’s an unbearably lonely performance, cloying and abrasive, but not without sympathy for its subject.

Sheil’s physical presence is exceptional, loose and limp in depression or contemplation, tight and mechanical in fits of panic and anger. The way her face tightens into a belligerent, scrunched-up knot of squinty eyes and trembling muscles feels almost rodent-like, but there’s a heedless berserker ferocity to her as well, as when she launches herself in a murderous rage at a woman she sees in Leo’s arms. For his part, Audley’s faux-cool customer vibe is a solid foil for Crystal’s chaotic dullness, a more socially acceptable form of dysfunction by dint of his gender and his tendency to keep quiet where Crystal rants and babbles. His resentful regret at getting mixed up in this woman’s crime and love life is apparent from his first moment in frame, eventually bubbling over into a repulsive display of adolescent rage in which he blames her for a murder he committed. It’s after one of his po-faced acts of physical violence that the film nails the ugly, pulsing knot at the center of Crystal’s life. Staring at her hands, she recounts the experience of being beaten by her husband and of wishing with all her heart for bruises in the wake of it, for some proof that what she was experiencing was real, was tangible, could be shared with others. She’s a woman so desperate for connection that at one point in her life, the mutilation of her body was her best hope to be understood.