Alex Herron’s Leave is a snoozy tale about lost daughters, Norwegian black metal and inaccessible terrors. Writer Thomas Moldestad unfavorably balances a young woman’s search for her mother with scares that barely register, to the point where its tone falls coldly flat. Conversational horrors become the main attraction as eyes dart and characters squirm when secrets from abroad unravel, which becomes tiresome since the spookier injections fail to produce spikes of excitement. Leave tells a story about the monsters of humanity, but is shy about terrifying its audience—a tragic flaw that cuts the genre’s volume like unplugging an amplifier mid-performance.
Alicia von Rittberg stars as Hunter White, who was found as a baby in a Massachusetts cemetery wrapped in cloth with satanic symbol designs. As an adult, she tells her non-biological father—the cop who found her—that she’s heading off for school, but that’s a lie. Hunter books a trip to Norway, hoping to find her birth mother, who might be Norwegian rock star Cecilia (Ellen Dorrit Petersen). There’s only one way to find out, and Hunter will do whatever it takes, no matter how expensive, time-consuming or unexpectedly dangerous.
Leave is an interrogation of Hunter’s family tree, starting in a music club, then navigating to the Norwegian countryside. One by one, Hunter confronts deadpan loose ends that bring her closer to answers. There’s a junior detective element that never catches on or allures as Hunter starts interviewing murderers who might have killed her mother, or relatives whose hospitality raises eyebrows. Herron embraces the awkwardness of Hunter’s fish-out-of-water situation, which should be profoundly uncomfortable, but isn’t enough to overcome a rotating door of played-straight side characters doubling as mediocre suspects.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
