I Would Like to See It: What Keeps You Alive

“Why are you doing this?” Jules (Brittany Allen) sobs to her wife Jackie (Hannah Emily Anderson as an adult, Charlotte Lindsay Marron as a young girl) after the other woman first attempts to murder her, then stalks her through the forest intent on finishing the job. Jules wants a reason. Everyone does, when a loved one begins to reveal their abusive tendencies. Over the course of the film Jules tries on explanation after explanation. You’re sick. Your parents did something to you. You’re desperate to feel something, anything. Only when she’s asked — her good behavior the price for the lives of their dinner guests — to recount the story of how she fell in love with Jackie does she come close to the truth. You never know. You can’t, really, and sometimes when you fling yourself off of that precipice in an attempt to alleviate the endless, aching loneliness that is the human condition, you find there’s nothing below but cold, hard rock.

In What Keeps You Alive, writer and director Colin Minihan grasps at the unending, almost fractal nature of abuse within the lesbian community and starts to pull the thread. We’re left to watch the whole of it unravel with no end in sight to the gory string, no final revelation to make sense of the whole nightmare. That the film’s every frame is so thoughtfully and energetically composed, its visual language incorporating the mounted-camera alienation of Breaking Bad at its most kinetic and the silent menace of a trackless forest like something out of von Trier’s Antichrist, is just sweetener dissolved in its acrid, burning poison. A sense of wrongness mounts as we move from unsettling revelations to brutal physical struggle to taut, Hitchcockian psychological suspense, but there is a familiarity to it, too. How many of us have sat beside our abusers and smiled and lied to dinner guests, to family, to concerned strangers? How many of us have thrown ourselves body and soul into trying to help people who get off on our suffering?

Obsession with closure, public masking, the apparently unreasoning sadism of the abuser and their demand for perfect rationality from their victim — What Keeps You Alive is uncommonly insightful as to the emotional experience of the abuse victim still bound to their abuser. Beyond Minihan’s dynamic and intimate camera, the film’s early moments of desire are so raw and real that they continue to throb through its worst and most dehumanizing sequences. Both leads are talented, but it’s Brittany Allen as Jules who conveys so naturally that uniquely dykey combination of vulnerability and tough posturing, a combination of personality traits which sing through one of the film’s most grueling and intimate self-surgery sequences. Even when she’s alone in the woods she makes for magnetic viewing, and in moments of crisis and terror the open vulnerability Allen communicates with only a fleeting expression hits like a freight train. Of all the last decade of violent dyke thrillers, What Keeps You Alive stands with the very best.