Review: Retrograde (2022)

Astrology plays a central role in Adrian Murray’s Retrograde. It informs the title—“retrograde” is when a planet appears to be moving backwards in the sky, which supposedly has drastic influences on the lives of people with certain astrological signs. As well, certain characters in the film are constantly discussing astrological charts and examining the world through an astrological lens. The film’s central character, Molly (Molly Reisman), bears some resemblance to the sorts of people who blame all their bad luck on “Mercury in retrograde,” as if the entirety of their current misfortunes and communication breakdowns are caused by an external force acting upon them, rather than their own independent choices. Ironically, Molly is the one character in the film who has no appetite for astrology.

The presence of astrology in the film also lends Retrograde a distinctly contemporary, urban, female focus. It showcases this time (early 2020s—sans pandemic) and this place (generic, urban North America, i.e. Toronto) and speaks to people who would only ever be comfortable in this very moment. Not that the characters are particularly comfortable in their own skin. Murray and his cast have an uncanny ability to depict some of the most frustratingly modern individuals, people who are perpetually unsettled. But such a specificity almost suffocates the movie. From the outset, preordained formal and narrative choices hem Retrograde in and keep it from exploring its characters in a spontaneous and illuminating manner.

In a sense, the film mirrors the narcissistic vision of contemporary astrology. As Molly argues in one of the film’s closing scenes, astrology is not so much about intuitively reading a person as about fitting a person into a closed box and viewing the entirety of their personality through the narrow confines of their chart. Retrograde takes a similarly limited, preordained approach to character. The film does not allow the characters to be informed by their environments, but has a preordained schematic that they must adhere to in order for the intended commentary about modern urban life to work.

Not that Retrograde is ultimately a film about astrology. It’s an indie drama about a particular type of person and their passive aggressive, blinkered way of experiencing the world. The well-received Canadian indie played Slamdance in 2022, so you know going in that this isn’t a multiplex film or even the sort of understated yet emotional indies that win at Sundance before getting a run in the fall. Rather, this is a small film with a microscopic perspective, a limiting style, and a naturalistic performative approach. It’s a film that mistakes simplicity for honesty, and a restrained formal approach for a contemplative one.

The film starts with a long take from the back of a car. We see Molly behind the wheel and her astrology-obsessed new roommate, Gabrielle (Sofia Banzhaf), in the passenger seat with a large plant on her lap. The car is parked off a highway and eventually a police officer tells Molly to roll down the window. The officer wants to know why Molly was driving erratically, and Molly tells him she thought he waved her in to merge, which is why she sped up and cut him off. He denies that he waved her in, gives her a ticket, and tells her to be safe driving home. Molly can’t believe it. She asks Gabrielle whether she can believe what just happened, and Gabrielle, bewildered, a bit absentmindedly, says, yeah, totally, it’s crazy. All this happens in a single take. To Molly, an injustice has just been carried out, and she’s going to fight it to the end.

Almost every scene in the brief 74-minute runtime of Retrograde depicts Molly’s attempts to fight this traffic ticket. She calls a lawyer, she sends angry emails to the city, she tries to exonerate herself to clerks, she argues with city prosecutors. When she’s not actively fighting the ticket, she’s fixating on it. At home, she discusses it with her roommates, Gabrielle and Rose (Bessie Cheng), who would rather be sorting through astrological charts and bonding over hidden meanings they unlock. At work, she asks for time off to attend various meetings and hearings, trying her boss’s patience. The truest thing about Retrograde is its depiction of Molly as a passive aggressive narcissist. The narcissism and obsessiveness of young people in the 21st century is a totalizing, near-universal force. Retrograde understands how soul-crushingly self-obsessed most people are today. But to what end?

If the filmmakers hoped to make viewers uncomfortable when watching Retrograde, they’ve succeeded, but there’s a difference between feeling skin-crawling discomfort at recognizing familiar, awful characters on screen, and simply being bored by a film that underlines a single point. The film is authentic in its portraits of the kinds of people you might meet at house parties in Toronto, or the kinds of cops who may pull you over on the 401, or the kinds of small talk you may have with work colleagues at a startup. But the authenticity doesn’t lend itself to credible drama.

The entire approach is a little staid, lethargic. For instance, there’s no score for the film, but there’s nothing naturalistic about the music-less approach. There are no scenes in public or seemingly-improvised moments amidst crowds. There’s just no music, which gives its quiet scenes a static quality.

Most scenes are long takes from the back seats of cars or a place across the room from the characters. The camera sometimes pans, but rarely, if ever, moves. The visuals are quiet and observant, but there are no pillow shots to add thematic texture, or wide, depersonalized shots that allow us to observe these individuals in environments outside of their little bubble. The camera sometimes seems too close yet too far from the characters, stuck between being a fly on the wall or an eavesdropping stranger at the next table over. It means the film misses out on the anthropological curiosity that you get with wide takes in a lot of international slow cinema (the films of Tsai Ming-liang or Apichatpong Weerasethakul, for instance), but not close enough to create much intimate, personalized drama.

Perhaps most importantly, there’s no subjective formal presentation here, yet the entire film is tethered to Molly’s experience. We never see any scene that she’s not directly involved in, but the film is not stylistically tethered to her reality. And despite the removed, seemingly-objective style, we’re artificially refused context. Crucially, we never see the incident with the police officer on the highway, only the aftermath. We observe how frustrating Molly is, and how much she is fixated on her idea of justice and reality. However, we never see reality through her eyes or, alternatively, gain a properly objective vision of what is happening in the film. The film withholds context, but not to generate tension. Rather, to underline its point that we make our own reality, we create the boxes we place ourselves into, we generate our own astrological charts and horoscopes, in a sense.

It’s all rather postmodern and subdued and exactly the kind of thing certain people will rave about at festivals and on Twitter, without really explaining why this story told in this way was so meaningful to them in the moment, and not in the abstract. I don’t begrudge a person overvaluing a work of art made at such a small scale. Making a feature film for under $100,000 is a major accomplishment (IMDb estimates the budget at $75,000) and getting into Slamdance is a big deal. But microtension is not tension, conceptual drama is not drama, and Retrograde is more of a schematic than a film. It made me uncomfortable not because it got under my skin, but because it generated so little emotion in me at all.

4 out of 10

Retrograde (2022, Canada)

Written and directed by Adrian Murray; Molly Reisman, Sofia Banzhaf, Bessie Cheng, Erik Anderson, Anne Archer, Peter Frangella.

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