Direction: Inon Shampanier
Country: USA
Lili Taylor’s flawless performance is perhaps the major reason why you should see Paper Spiders, a disenchanted family drama co-written and directed by Inon Shampanier.
Taylor is Dawn, a recent widow whose anxiety ramps up when confronted with the fact that her only daughter, Melanie (Stefania LaVie Owen), is about to move away for college. The idea of living completely alone is already painful, but this matter gets an unthinkable proportion since Dawn has been showing signs of persecutory delusional disorder. She obsesses daily with a neighbor who, undeservedly, receives a temporary restraining order against him. In addition to this challenge, Melanie has another complicated situation to deal with: an unreliable boyfriend with a drinking problem.
Although there are individual scenes of powerful acting, the narrative’s pulse is pretty conventional, the editing is faltering as a few segments feel either unnecessary or underdeveloped, and the ending was too neatly wrapped to convince. Disillusion and embarrassment comes from every side in repetitive waves.
Paper Spiders rubs the mainstream melodrama, escaping its own grimness through hope while operating solely on a restrained emotional level. Shampanier’s ambitious project was partially saved by the two leads, who do all the heavy lifting.
