I have a real weakness for movies about women who are, technically speaking, fucking unbearable. Not evil, per se, but morally irredeemable and socially catastrophic for sure. I want to watch her flail and err and think, “girl..please stop.” Sabrina Greco’s debut feature locks in on this strain of female complexity and human embarrassment, creating a cringe-inducing, mumblecore-coded, watch-through-your-fingers indie gem.
Lockjaw follows Rayna (Blu Hunt) six weeks after a drunk-driving accident left her jaw wired shut. She has since “stopped drinking,” which should make a lowkey night with friends at a magic show a fairly reasonable first outing. Instead, a slow-motion social disaster unfolds and Rayna spends the evening detonating her relationships, making new enemies, and ensuring that the attention never strays too far from her.
Greco said she wanted to experiment with the contradiction of giving her lead character a serious physical limitation while allowing her to remain “big and bold.” Rayna literally cannot open her mouth but nobody is able to shut her up. Blu Hunt communicates almost everything through her eyes, body language and whatever she can be squeeze through the prosthetic. Her layered performance and commitment to selling Rayna’s aloof obnoxiousness is beyond impressive.
Like I said before, I love unbearable women on screen. But I was particularly taken by Rayna because she does something objectively bad, then just continues to be shitty afterwards. Despite the circumstances being entirely Rayna’s fault, Greco chooses not to show the car accident, making it easier to be charmed by her whims. It’s maybe the film’s most interesting little sleight of hand, we know she’s awful but we’re still rooting for her to make things worse.
Lockjaw really hits the cringecore pleasure center when Rayna and her guilt-uationship Mitch (Colin Burgess) go back to the enigmatic magician’s (Nick Corirossi) bungalow for an intimate afterparty. Mitch is a spectacular simp, sticking around while she treats him like shit, essentially romanticizing a human car crash because he can’t decide whether he wants to help her, fuck her, or both. It’s always fun to watch a guy get cucked by a clairvoyant and his wife. It’s equally as fun to watch Rayna bulldoze her way through every interaction. Friends become romantic nuisances; romantic nuisances become humiliations; humiliations become opportunities for Rayna to double down. Greco describes the surrounding characters as either victims or sources of humour who counterbalance Rayna’s self-destructive loop.
Stylistically, Lockjaw is like a hidden camera show meets multi-cam sitcom, complete with wipe transitions and 4 characters repeatedly entering and exiting the house Seinfeld-style. In theory, the theatrical quality suits a movie like this, but I found that it ultimately sullied the story into an ongoing improv exercise. It weakens what is otherwise the film’s sharpest aspect: the social discomfort.
The film is also at its most tantalizing when it gestures toward something darker, Rayna’s relationship with alcohol. One of the film’s most bleak visual jokes is when she puts booze into a syringe to drink through her wired-shut mouth. It’s the perfect distillation of her pathological willfulness, yet the film doesn’t quite excavate what that gesture says about her. A line directed at Rayna is the closest we get to the bone, “What’s the point of not drinking if you’re just gonna act out anyways?” By the final stretch, Lockjaw starts circling instead of deepening. The creeping suspicions plateau, the sexual tension gets no payoff, and the dynamics become a bit tediously twee.
There are places where Lockjaw feels like it’s still figuring out what it wants to be, but it’s hard to come away from it without being excited by Greco’s filmmaking instincts. It’s a debut in the most complimentary way possible because it’s ambitious, strange, occasionally overstuffed, but clearly made by someone with a unique point of view. Not to mention it was shot in only 11 days with a skeleton crew and a micro-budget. Greco has a fuck ton of talent, and I’d take a slightly messy first feature with this much personality over some technically spotless slop any day.
LOCKJAW is now available to stream, rent, or buy digitally.
Images Courtesy of Magenta Edge Films
