Whistler Film Festival review: The Burning Season grasps the subtle inflections of a destructive affair
Sean Garrity’s feature gets at both sides of the lies
The Burning Season.
The Burning Season runs December 1 at 12 pm at Village 8 - Theatre 8 and December 4 to 17 online as part of Whistler Film Festival
A NARRATIVE GIMMICK is put to good use in The Burning Season, which tells its story of a destructive affair in reverse like Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (and the Seinfeld spoof that followed in the ‘90s.) Sean Garrity’s feature opens with one of the more excruciating wedding disasters committed to film—it’s instantly gripping—and it’s no spoiler to reveal here that groom JB (Jonas Chernick) and guest Alena (Sara Canning) are obviously involved in a twisted deception, made so much worse by the rail he snorts right before exchanging vows.
This is Winnipeg-native Garrity and his frequent collaborator Chernick in the contrived narrative mode they brought to their ambitious 2013 thriller Blood Pressure, but The Burning Season (written by Chernick with Diana Frances) coheres in a much more satisfactory way. The leads both excel with characters whose motivations and sympathies believably shift from one “chapter” to the next as the film backstops its way to its origin mystery.
What is it that binds these two people as they push and pull at one another and risk everything over the course of several summers at his Lake Country resort? The film also has a credible grasp on the subtle emotional inflections of an affair, on both sides of the lies, while the trick logic of the screenplay is tight as a drum and paced to perfection.
If there’s a criticism, it’s that Garrity and Chernick’s construct is so compelling that it has nowhere to go but up, necessarily building to a somewhat melodramatic denouement (or “prologue”, in this case). But even that falls just on the right side of too much.
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