Institute History
Description
Sarah (Riley Keough), a young mother, raises her precocious daughter in their country home while feeling abandoned by her husband, who perpetually travels for work. When Sarah’s old friend Mindy (Jena Malone) comes to visit, they decide to take a road trip, and after an alcohol-infused heart-to-heart, a long unspoken intimacy emerges between the longtime friends. Later Sarah is unable to articulate her thoughts about her husband or Mindy, and Mindy makes the decision to leave the trip and go home. Three years later, the two women are reunited for Mindy’s wedding, and Sarah is forced to reconcile the reality of her feelings.
Sundance Film Festival alumna So Yong Kim (In Between Days, For Ellen) delicately strips down the central relationship of Lovesong using the poetics of naturalism and minimalism, where silence and gazes tell a more complete story than explicit dialogue. Keough delivers a beautifully understated and interior performance as Sarah, a woman suffocating in her isolation. Quietly cinematic and picturesque, Lovesong is a bittersweet, elliptical love story about muted desire and the gray area that can define a relationship.