Thanksgiving Movies: Krisha

Set entirely on a Thanksgiving day at a family gathering in a Houston suburb, the 2015 drama?/comedy?/horror?/disaster? film Krisha is one of the most thought-provoking movies I’ve ever seen.

The opening scene of Krisha is a single shot that lasts six minutes. The viewer quickly sees that there is a rattling backstory.

“Krisha” is an assault, from the first unforgettable moment on.
RogerEbert.com

Plot Summary: Recovering alcoholic and addict Krisha hopes to reconnect with her estranged family at Thanksgiving.

Krisha Fairchild, the aunt of director Trey Edward Shults’, plays the lead role in Krisha.

The role of Krisha’s son Trey is played by director (and nephew of Krisha Fairchild) Trey Edward Shults.

The story behind shooting “Krisha” is almost as extraordinary as the film itself. Shot over nine days in the Texas home of Shults’ parents, the cast is made up of members of Shults’ family (most of them are not actors). In interviews, Shults and his family are quite open about the fact that the film is based on their shared experience with an addict relative. The film feels like a blazing catharsis for all involved. Shults’ mother (a therapist in real life) has a scene with Krisha in an upstairs bathroom that is so pained, so raw, that it puts other confrontation scenes in other films to shame.
RogerEbert.com

Some interesting film trivia…

Billie Fairchild, who plays Grandma in the film, is actually suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, so she was not entirely aware she was acting in a film, although director Trey Edward Shults said she had a wonderful time at the “Thanksgiving.”
Krisha is seen with a missing portion of her finger, which is never explained throughout the film; in real-life actress Krisha Fairchild lost the tip of her index finger while trying to break up a dogfight shortly before the start of filming. She wanted to back out of the film because of the injury but eventually agreed to stay on.
Filmed entirely at director Trey Edward Shults’s mother’s house in Houston. [ed. note: the film does have a Houston burbs vibe]

(l to r) Actor Billy Wise (Doyle), Krisha Fairchild (Krisha), and writer/director/actor Trey Shults (Trey).

By Filmwax Radio – Bill Wise, Krisha Fairchild & Trey Edward Shults, CC BY-SA 2.0

WLBOTT Ministry of Virtue and Vice: adult themes, wordy durds. It is a difficult, beautiful, intense, uncomfortable, heart-wrenching movie to watch. This is a very sad movie.

In contract to Pieces of April, dysfunction triumphs over love (at least during the timeframe of the movie).

An incredible tension is captured in just the typical background of a Thanksgiving gathering:

The camera works to convey Krisha’s inner thoughts and emotional state. It stands in the middle of the kitchen and, in one take, captures all the goings-on within the house. There are cousins playing with a ball in the living room, people cheering at a football game on tv, aunts and uncles walking around or trying to find Tupperware lids, dogs barking and running, and so on. The camerawork is somehow simultaneously erratic and extremely precise.
Film Cred

The background of constantly barking dogs and the edgy, staccato soundtrack puts the viewer on edge.

The movie brings up the concept of free will with the escalating and compounding nature of Krisha’s struggle. How much can you throw at someone? Is it inevitable that there will be a single straw that breaks the camel’s back?

Doyle (played by Bill Wise), Krisha’s brother-in-law, has a pivotal role in the movie. Initially, he seems like a breath of fresh air – making Krisha feel that he is perhaps the only one who understands her. The viewer initially feels a sense of relief – here is someone who’s going to get her through the day. But he uses his humor to disarm her, and invites her into his safe space, the “place of healing”. But Doyle is a trickster and a bully – when a guarded Krisha declines his invitation to emotional intimacy, he becomes her most virulent tormentor.

As Doyle’s harshest criticisms are leveled at Krisha, the camera stays focused on Krisha’s face.

Doyle also appears to be the only character displaying a religious symbol – a crucifix necklace. (Krisha, in contrast, wears the key to her pill box as a necklace.) Is Doyle’s necklace meant to be ironic?

As the day wears on, Krisha‘s isolation grows. Her mother, who has dementia, recognizes other family members but fails to recognize Krisha.

The Grandma is played by Trey’s actual grandma, Billie Fairchild, who suffers from dementia IRL.

On casting Shults’ 92-year-old grandmother and Fairchild’s mother, who has dementia, to play Krisha’s mother

Shults: She didn’t fully understand — she still doesn’t fully understand she’s in a movie, you know. But everything we shot with her was more like a documentary. The big scene where we bring her home to meet the family the first time, we put her in a separate room, in the office, and then … on the third take we did it and she started talking about some subtext of the film — she started talking about her mother and family lineage.

Fairchild: [My sisters and I] always drove to the home where she lives to pick her up and bring her to the set, and always drove her back at night. So we experienced what it was she thought she was doing. To her mind, she had three days in a row where she got to go to a house where everybody was so incredibly sweet to her. She loved everybody that was there; they all loved her back. She sat in the dining room, where there was beautiful crystal on the table. She never got to eat the meal, though.

Shults: And she was mad it wasn’t real wine in the glasses.

Fairchild: She definitely was mad it wasn’t real wine in the glasses. [Laughs]
NPR

Krisha succumbs to her demons and looses her sobriety in a profound way. She drops the turkey in front of the entire gathering.

In a chaotic pan that follows the slow-motion turkey-drop, the family members express concern, except Doyle, who displays an almost fiendish rage.

Semi-Sequitur: Krisha was Trey Shults’ feature-length directorial debut.

[Krisha] received the Grand Jury Award and Audience Award in the narrative feature competition at the 2015 South by Southwest Film Festival. It was selected to compete in the International Critics’ Week section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. The film was released in a limited release on March 18, 2016, by A24
Wikipedia

Here are some additional prominent directorial debuts:

There seems to be an inevitability to the events – like watching the Newtonian forces play out in a bridge collapse. Does Krisha have agency, responsibility, free will?

Ultimately, the movie ends with many unanswered questions. Even the exact nature of Kisha’s disastrous relapse in ambiguous – the director presents several alternative versions of the same calamitous dinner scene. I think this is supposed to represent the different realities experienced by Kisha and her family members, but it is impossible to know who experiences what – it is intentionally confusing. Will there be a future for Krisha? Forgiveness? Redemption? Acceptance?

[NPR interview, lightly edited]

Fairchild: When [my mother] began to drink heavily — she was a late-onset alcoholic and she would fall and hit herself, so she has a lot of cognitive brain damage as well….

Our mother was a role model for any wonderful, loving, sweet human person until she was in her 50s. So we will always be able to see what happened to her as tragic and also laugh and love her. We had her. A lot of people aren’t lucky enough to have the best of the people that they love. They only get them during the worst.

Fairchild: I had a lot of nights I cried myself to sleep about the people that I was representing. We didn’t get it. We didn’t get that we couldn’t save them. We didn’t get that our job was to love them until they realized they had to save themselves, all right? I didn’t get that while they were alive. I kept thinking that I could save them. We put my mom in rehab places under duress three times. There were ways that I failed them, not in what I couldn’t do for them, but what I couldn’t help them understand they needed to do for themselves.

Shults: I know one thing I always wanted with the film is to have …empathy for Krisha’s character and for an audience to care about her and to go on this journey with her, even if it’s a downward spiral journey. I know I cried like a baby making it and editing it and then thinking about family members with it. … It’s all about forgiveness.
NPR

Forgiveness by the Numbers

This movie examines forgiveness and redemption. A story from the gospels encourages a dogged persistence. Let’s lighten up a bit and quantify it:

According to the Bible, Jesus said to forgive someone “seventy-seven times“. This is also translated as “seventy times seven” which is 490 times.

In Matthew 18:21-22, Jesus responds to Peter’s question about how many times to forgive someone. Peter asks, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”. Jesus replies, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times”.

The number “seventy-seven” is symbolic and represents the never-ending nature of forgiveness. Jesus also taught, “If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you” (Mt 6:14).

In Luke 17:4, Jesus says to forgive someone seven times in one day. This would add up to over 2,500 acts of forgiveness each year.
[Generative AI]

In the Bible, the number 490 is associated with the “seventy weeks” prophecy in the book of Daniel (Daniel 9:24-27). In this context, 490 is said to represent a period of time related to the fulfillment of certain events.
ChatGPT

That’s 13,413,750 forgiveness episodes.