One Flew Over the Funny Farm: Alison Brie's empathetic performance leads tonally jarring "Horse Girl"

Horse Girl (2020)
104 min.
Release Date: February 7, 2020 (Netflix)

“Horse Girl” is an odd duck of a film that takes big, challenging swings in exploring mental illness, but it doesn’t begin that way. For a while, this indie is a quirky, low-key character-focused drama with some cringey humor, and as its oddball “horse girl” of the title goes down a rabbit hole of paranoia and confusion, the film follows suit. Even as the narrative loses its way into elusive, way-out-there abstraction, Alison Brie (Netflix’s “Glow”) does anchor the proceedings as much as she can, committing to her performance and to the script she co-wrote with director Jeff Baena (2017’s “The Little Hours”). “Horse Girl” is too peculiar to be uninteresting, but it doesn’t quite work, either.

Alison Brie plays Sarah, a sweet-but-shy saleswoman at a crafts store. Her closest friend is probably her enthusiastic, motherly co-worker, Joan (Molly Shannon). Rather than go out with the friends she doesn’t really have, she visits the horse she used to ride or stays in and watches her favorite supernatural crime show, while making “anklets.” She attends a Zumba class, but she doesn’t really socialize well. On her birthday, Sarah’s roommate (Debby Ryan) encourages her boyfriend (Jake Picking) to invite over his single roommate, Darren (John Reynolds), who shares a name with the lead character on Sarah’s favorite show “Purgatory.” They are both socially awkward but eventually hit off, and he even comes back in the morning to get her phone number and ask her out on a date. As things start panning out for Sarah, her sleepwalking worsens, she experiences memory lapses and nosebleeds, and then she has lucid dreams involving a possible alien abduction alongside people she’s never met before. Is Sarah having a mental break, or is she really a clone of her grandmother as she truly believes?  

As the viewer watches “Horse Girl,” one might be reminded of 2015’s “Welcome to Me,” where Kristen Wiig played a woman with borderline personality disorder. That film had its own problems with tone, but Wiig fearlessly threw herself into the character without vanity, just as Alison Brie does here. Before it takes a strange, sobering left turn—are Sarah’s suspicions of an alien abduction actually happening?—the film is an empathetic character piece, and Josiah Stenbrick and Jeremy Zuckerman’s drum-laden score puts one suitably on edge. Above all else, this is a real showcase for Brie to show her dramatic range, as she gives an emotionally open and rawly convincing performance that breaks our hearts. Brie also shares a warm, lived-in dynamic with Molly Shannon and a deliciously awkward chemistry with John Reynolds (Hulu’s “Four Weddings and a Funeral”). Offbeat and sensitively handled until the tonal shift is too jarring for director Jeff Baena, “Horse Girl” still remains a film to root for because of the talent involved and the subject matter it’s trying to broach. If only the implications of the final scene with Sarah were more haunting and resonant than head-scratching.

Grade: C +

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