J Paul Johnson
And Her Body Was Never Found opens, to put it unsubtly, with a man jacking off on a woman’s tits. It’s something of a surprise to see that from there it develops into a film of considerable complexity, unfolding layer after layer of narrative through several genres, aspect ratios, and film sources into something that can’t quite be described in a single phrase but includes relationship drama, wilderness survival, found-footage horror, and self-reflexive meta-storytelling. A breakout hit at SXSW for the husband-wife team of Austin locals Polaris Banks and Mor Cohen, it’s well deserving of wider release.
About that first scene: the fact that there’s no money shot, so to speak, is telling. The woman is completely uninterested. She’s just an object at the moment, a target. The man is calling the shot, immersed in his own gratification but oblivious to hers. Turns out the moment isn’t just a simple and desperate ploy for attention: it’s indicative of their entire unstable relationship.
The two are married, as we learn, hikers, Jeff (Banks) and Keren (Cohen) who can’t help but squabble on their trek to a campsite destination. Every benign aside opens an old wound; every simple question invites debate; and every exchange devolves into an argument. With no one and nothing except for nature to interrupt them, the hike becomes a brouhaha that would make Mike Nichols’ famous George and Martha (then-married Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor) in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? look like a pair of lightweights.
Reedy Jeff is a skilled debater, ever ready to find an opening, create a weakness, and pick at it like a crusting scab. Enamored of his own intellect, he preys on Keren’s insecurities, gaslighting like an expert with his insincere apologies and sudden de-escalations, acting the nice guy just often enough to have Keren doubt whether she should cast him aside once and for all. She can’t, though: Keren is at least a little less than sure of herself, as a woman, as a wife, and as it turns out, as a legal immigrant. She’s married Jeff in part for a green card. And she’s dependent on him for navigating the terrain’s narrow paths and steep ascents. Even so, she’s had enough and simply won’t stand for her husband’s incessant belittlement.
This opening act, following the two characters across mountainous terrain and over the better part of two consecutive days, constitutes the film’s full first 35 minutes of its slender 75-minute runtime, and it’s great. Portraying the marrieds, Banks and Cohen give every line their all, and every line they give, from whispers to shouts, heartfelt pleas to bitter epithets, rings with the truth of a failing relationship. That’s no easy trick, with a skeleton crew in harsh terrain to boot, but the writing and the performances could hardly be better.
The stunning cinematography of the locale, from its gorgeous waterfalls to forests weeping with moss, from dense thickets to sweeping vistas, barely even distracts Jeff and Keren from their fighting. An overtly Hitchcockian score echoing Bernard Herrmann, courtesy of Nathan Schram, stitches together the few moments when Jeff and Keren fall quiet. All along, of course, the film’s foreboding title, And Her Body Was Never Found, plays with viewers’ expectations, fostering a deep sense of dread for Keren’s fate. But above all, the conceit—the two married people alone as can be, forced to confront their anxieties and insecurities—places a premium on the quality of the script and the performers, and both are well up to the task.
Jeff and Keren’s hostilities reach their apex at a cliffside with a steep fall. Their anger has nearly turned physical, but for the moment waned. Still, Keren is suspicious that Jeff has led her to the precipice only to send her plummeting to her death. And given her husband’s incessant nitpicking, gaslighting, and now even casual talk of murder—Jeff is practically the very reason why any woman would, as they say, “choose the bear”—her fears, like viewers’, are justified.
Spoiler alert: The film has several plot twists, the first major of which is revealed below. It’s part of the film’s promotional materials, so I’ll leave the others for the viewing audiences to discover for themselves. No matter what one thinks of the twist(s), And Her Body Was Never Found is very much worth a watch.
It’s here that And Her Body Was Never Found makes the first of what will be several meta turns. Jeff and Keren are, we learn, fictional characters, played by married couple Polaris and Mor, who have made this trek for the precise purpose of making a film, based in part on their own marital difficulties. It’s a neat enough trick, and the turn motivates the second and third acts, which, without giving away any spoilers, send the film in several new and surprising directions.
Now Polaris and Mor, we learn, not only have spent the last 48 hours revisiting and re-enacting old resentments, they’ve escalated them into physical and legal threats. And even so, Polaris, in particular, is convinced that all of these escalations and hostilities just might make for great art. As the two navigate their frayed relationship, their commitment to their craft, and their trek back down the mountain–without cell service and in increasingly dangerous conditions—the narrative reaches breaking point after breaking point.
With several different aspect ratios and camera technologies and multiple layers of meta-narrative, And Her Body Was Never Found is nothing if not inventive. Banks and Cohen both deliver bravura performances in difficult circumstances, made even more impressive by the fact that they, along with just one other actor and composer Schram, are credited with its making (alongside one other cameraperson and a handful of sound and makeup technicians). Banks directs and edits, Cohen produces, and both are credited as writers and cinematographers.
The film’s meta twists and turns are clearly designed to blur the lines between the factual and the fictional and raise questions about the ethics of cinematic storytelling. I might be in the minority to say so, but I found its first act its most compelling, at least emotionally. While to learn the characters with whom we’ve spent a full half hour investing in are, in the film’s diegesis, fictional and being performed by the actors we are now asked to re-invest in, to me deflates the emotional richness it’s already developed. But by its end, even if a happy ending has never looked quite so unhappy, And Her Body Was Never Found has delivered such a rich array of surprises that it’s hard to complain.
