Review: Concussion

Stacie Passon's mildly Hitchcockian puzzle picture offers us – after the popular The Kids Are All Right – another reason to celebrate widening horizons. It's a creepy film that allows many mysteries to accumulate, and is all the better for that. The excellent Robin Weigert plays a middle-class woman married to another middle-class woman, who, after being struck on the head with a baseball, appears to react against the comfort and conformity of her safe suburban surroundings. It's a grim environment, all right.

"You know what they say: after you hit 40 you have to choose between your ass and your face," a fellow drone says in an opening sequence set in the gym. Still, her decision to drift into prostitution seems like a radical step. Shot in subtle indie-neutral shades, the film combines the class of social satire Todd Haynes might appreciate with a tense accumulation of knotty half-answered moral quandaries. I suppose we're obliged to make some comparison with Buñuel's Belle de Jour . But Passon's fine film treads its own hitherto underexplored pathways.