The Gaslight Flame Burns Bright in a Thriller Located Somewhere Quiet
The phrase “gaslight” has been used so often in the past decade that it’s tempting to dismiss it out of hand (if not necessarily try to convince the user that they’re crazy for having done so). But Somewhere Quiet, a modest thriller that debuted in the U.S. Narrative Competition at this year’s Tribeca Festival, earns the term the old-fashioned way: By recalling the classic 1944 thriller Gaslight, wherein a husband attempts to convince his wife to question her own sanity, to better cover up his own criminal activities.
That’s not exactly the premise of Somewhere Quiet, but it explores similar psychological territory without ceding ground to absurdity or buzzwords. We first see Meg (Jennifer Kim) fleeing some kind of traumatizing situation under great distress. Shortly thereafter, we learn that she was the victim of a kidnapping plot, where she was held for an extended period of time but eventually made her way back to her husband Scott (indie mainstay Kentucker Audley). Attempting to soothe her jangled nerves, Scott brings Meg to his family’s ocean-adjacent vacation house in the off-season, when there aren’t many other people around to bother them. Meg is bothered nonetheless, by the surprise presence of Scott’s cousin Madeline (Marin Ireland), staying in another nearby family home.
Ireland has become an elite-level character actress in projects as varied as Hell or High Water, The Irishman, and The Boogeyman; give her five or ten minutes, and she can make your movie that much better. Here she has a more substantial role that has her playing two different notes at once; at any given time, she has to appear warm and welcoming to Scott and off-putting to Meg. She accomplishes this by digging into the kind of chummy presumptuousness that can only be bought with an upper-class line of credit. It’s a perfect deployment of a performer with gravity and charisma, but not movie-star-level familiarity. Is Madeline just a self-possessed rich-woman type, or something more sinister? Even if the movie had no other aspirations toward genre thrills, the scenes between Meg and Madeline would still strain with prickly, sometimes agonizing social tension.