Herzog: My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009)

Based loosely on the Mark Yavorsky case, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done stars Michael Shannon as Brad McCallum, a sensitive, introspective actor who barricades himself in his San Diego house after murdering his mother (Grace Zabriskie) with an antique saber. Most of the film takes place in flashback, as Detective Hank Havenhurst (Willem Defoe) questions Brad’s girlfriend (Chloe Sevigny) and acting teacher (Udo Kier) on the street outside. However, the flashbacks just make things more complicated, since it’s clear right away that they constitute something like Herzog’s tribute to David Lynch, who produced the film. Not only are they suffused with Lynchian iconography, but they take the sinuous dream-sequences of Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive and stretch them at either end, until they’re more loftily visionary and freakishly kitsch than even Lynch tends to craft them. As they distend, they open up great glissandoes of space, until it feels as if all movement is relative, and all objects are provisional, placeholders for something that exceeds them, most spectacularly in a sequence that takes place in the Westin San Diego, casting us adrift amongst an utterly frictionless world of fountains, elevators, exercise bikes and open-plan restaurants. With nothing truly stationary, nothing feels resistant either – everything proceeds with the indefinite momentum you find in a vacuum - until it’s only by killing his mother that Brad can hope to find a still point, a fleeting moment of resistance. But it’s vanished before the film has even begun, before the crime is even committed, sending him back  to the same sombient resignation that opens and presides over every flashback, the strange apathy you feel when you know that you’re dreaming, but you can’t wake up. And, like a dream, the film anonymises you, just as the San Diego sprawl adds a touch of dreamlike anonymity to every encounter, gradually divesting every object of everything except its closeness to other objects, smothering every scene in a sea of liquid surfaces.