Beta-male-goes-mad time with Sharp Corner, borrowing the arc of The Shining and starring Ben Foster as a Jack Nicholson stand-in.
There is no Overlook Hotel or supernatural stuff. Instead the action takes place in a “mansion” outside the city where Foster’s Josh McCall has moved his family, not once wondering why this great big house in the middle of nowhere could be bought at a price they could afford.
The reason becomes obvious on their first night in the place when, as Josh and wife Rachel (Cobie Smulders) christen their new home by having sex on living room floor, they are rudely interrupted by a car wheel flying through their picture window.
Sharp minds will already have connected up the title with the plot. The house is on a tight bend and this is the situation they now have to deal with – speeding cars regularly losing control on the corner and winding up on their lawn, in cars that have overturned or are on fire, with some occupants dying as Josh, Rachel and son Max (William Kosovic) look on helplessly.
How would you react to all this? That appears at first glance to be the way the story is heading. Sensible Rachel starts making noises about moving out, while Josh, doubling down on a bad decision, resists. He goes further, in fact, and starts patrolling the bend, taking lessons in first aid and exhibiting the sort of weirdly obsessive behaviour that wound up with Jack Nicholson taking an axe to the door in The Shining. Notice the chain saw in Josh’s hand in so much of the promo material.
As Josh starts to neglect his work and his family to focus on the “sharp corner”, Foster plays him as a man whose nature is revealed under stress. As the spinouts keep happening, Josh gets prissier and more fastidious. Soon he’s dabbing his mouth with a towel when he eats, cutting toast soldiers just so to dip in his boiled egg. He even starts mincing, his gait another warning of an impending crack-up that’s going to measure on the Richter Scale.
It’s a baffling performance. After all, if motor vehicles were regularly piling into the front of your house, a normal reaction might be to lose your shit. Foster seems to be suggesting that manliness, or an underlying lack of it, might be somehow behind events.
Watching films about people going mad can be a hard watch, and Foster piles it on, leading me at one point to wonder if I was finding Josh irksome or Foster. You might wonder where he’s been all these years since films like 2009’s The Messenger and 2018’s Leave No Trace suggested Foster was going to be the next of the intense Method Men, a new version of Sean Penn, maybe.
He’s made eight films this decade so he’s not been hiding. Here, in many respects, he’s playing against type in a Richard Dreyfuss role – the sulky little man. His character and performance dominate the film. This leaves little to do for Smulders, and there’s not much at all left for Kosovic as young Max, who has the look of young Danny in Kubrick’s film, which seems to haunt this one unhealthily.
The soundtrack is unsettling – spooky, creepy, full of disquieting rumbles and sudden Wagnerian horns. It’s excellent and another case of composer Stephen McKeon bringing the goods. He also scored Rose Plays Julia and The Hole in the Ground, movies where paranoia also bubbles away.
This is director/writer Jason Buxton’s first film since his debut, 2012’s Blackbird. It isn’t an unalloyed success, but it almost is. Maybe those cars are just too literal as a metaphor for a mental breakdown. But the sense of the weird is powerful.
Sharp Corner – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
