Latest news with #SharpCorner
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Sharp Corner': Ben Foster, Cobie Smulders Canadian movie is a 'cautionary tale' about obsession, narcissism
Following his film Blackbird, filmmaker Jason Buxton adapted the short story by Russell Wangersky for his latest film Sharp Corner (now in theatres). Filmed in Nova Scotia, starring Ben Foster and Cobie Smulders, the thriller is a disturbing, but incredibly captivating exploration of obsession. In Sharp Corner, Josh (Foster) moves into a new home with his wife Rachel (Smulders) and their young son Max (Will Kosovic). While this seemed like their dream house, things take a dark turn when multiple drivers crash and die on the road just outside the home. Josh develops an obsession with the fatalities, which becomes all consuming in his life. While Buxton optioned four stories from Wangersky's collection, the filmmaker identified that this narrative felt like a great "jumping off point" to explore obsession. "What Russell gave was this really incredible character who finds a sense of purpose in being front row to these accidents and has this fascination with the misery of others," Buxton told Yahoo Canada. But to bring Wangersky's story to the screen, Buxton expanded the author's foundation into a three-act structure. "I imposed on top of that this idea that [Josh] develops a saviour complex and I wanted to see to what length that character would go to see that through," Buxton said. At the core of Buxton's desire to craft this story was an interest in exploring obsession, but specifically how that leads into a type of narcissism for Josh. Beginning the process of making this movie more than a decade ago, putting it aside to work on other projects in between, Buxton also took note of his own perfectionism. "Coming off of my first feature film and having a tendency to be a perfectionist with my writing, and ... my daughter was young at the time, and observing that even when I left the writing, put it down for the day, it was in my head, and I would be not present with my loved ones," Buxton said. "And I was observing that was a type of narcissism." "So when the story came along, that's what I wanted to explore. I wanted to tell a cautionary tale about that type of narcissism. And for me, it was like chasing this perfection and, in a way, not feeling adequate enough. But ... there can be collateral damage to that when one isn't present for the people in their lives." Throughout Sharp Corner, Buxton has a particularly impactful way of building tension, specifically with Foster's character, but there's an eerie feeling in the film that's really amplified through the sound design and Buxton's approach to camera movement. "I wanted to draw people into the narrative and then identify with this main character and his goal, but then slowly sort of pull the rug out in terms of it feeling ... more and more uncomfortable, as we see this person spiral downward," Buxton explained. "We want him to achieve his goal and it becomes a little bit malicious, and so what does that say about us? That was what I was going after." "Once the audience is introduced to an accident and then a second accident, we know there's another one coming and another one coming. And so using sound design, using patience with the camera to build that tension, was a lot of fun. ... The sound design, ... every time we would hear a car go around the corner, you don't know if this is going to be the next one that's going to end up in a crash. And I think the setup itself provided a great opportunity to sort of ratchet up that tension and keep it at that high level." But going to the theatre to watch a movie from a Canadian filmmaker, with a largely Canadian cast and crew, filmed in Canada, has a specific impact at this time in 2025. Sharp Corner is being released just as conversations about U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs on Canada are top of mind, with several movements to support Canadian industries. Buxton highlighted that while this film is certainly a North American story, there was a "deliberate decision" to set the story in Halifax. "The character in this, this man who's lost maybe a sense of purpose in his life and is disenfranchised. In a way, it speaks more to what's going on politically today than it did perhaps when I started writing it," he said. "The whole U.S., Canada tensions, it's really unfortunate that that's happening right now. And we are releasing in both countries, so we hope Canadians and Americans come out to see the movie."
CBC
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Co-stars Cobie Smulders and Ben Foster on their Canadian thriller, Sharp Corner
Actors Cobie Smulders and Ben Foster share why Sharp Corner was an alluring project and talk about their experience filming in Halifax.
Calgary Herald
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Calgary Herald
Canadian filmmaker Jason Buxton's second feature, Sharp Corner, a study in obsession
Article content Soon, another accident happens with similarly tragic results. Rachel demands they move, but Josh becomes obsessed with the two victims claimed by the crashes and increasingly transfixed by the potential that it might happen again. He spends much of his day looking out the panoramic window onto the road and waiting. Article content His private and professional life begins to unravel as he obsesses over saving future victims. Sharp Corner is based on a short story by Canadian author and journalist Russell Wangersky from his 2006 Giller long-listed debut collection, The Hour of Bad Decisions. Initially, Buxton wanted to tackle several stories from the book and weave them together in a structure similar to Paul Thomas Anderson's 1999 episodic drama Magnolia or Robert Altman's 1993 comedy-drama Short Cuts, which was inspired by the short stories of Raymond Carver. Article content 'All of Russell's work really appealed to me, but with that story, in particular, I was looking for something that would talk about obsession,' Buxton says. 'As a writer, I would often become very tunnelled. Even when I put down my writing for the day, I would still be solving problems in my head at dinner and not paying attention to my family. I realized that this short story gave me a really good template to look at obsession and how turning away from one's family can happen and the dangers of that.' Article content Article content Buxton said he walked through bookstores looking for potential CanLit material he could turn into film. It's his first since his acclaimed 2012 debut Blackbird, a drama about a bullied goth teen wrongly accused of plotting a school shooting. Sharp Corner was a long-gestating project for the Nova Scotia-based filmmaker, who began developing it years ago but was delayed by his work on a CBC miniseries that was shelved by COVID-19. Article content He would eventually take a few liberties with Wangersky's work when adapting his story for the screen. Article content 'In the short story, the character doesn't develop a saviour complex, it was something I added,' Buxton plays. 'The way that Ben Foster is at the beginning, that's the character Russell had written. The couple in his story didn't have a child. Those were all inventions that I came up with when I adapted the story into a two-hour movie. It didn't have what we think of as a three-act structure; it was more about the character who became an expert on these accidents that were happening in front of his house, and his wife doesn't understand why he seemed to be fascinated and gain something from these experiences. In fact, the original title I was working under when I had the other stories of Russell's was The Misery of Others. I felt like the character is obsessively drawn to the misery of others. In a way, I thought of it as a character who doesn't have an understanding of his own psyche. He doesn't have a relationship with his interior life and is perhaps cut off emotionally, and so this reawakens something.' Article content Article content Not an easy character to portray. Foster first gained attention as a teen actor in the late 1990s and early aughts in films such as Liberty Heights and Get Over It but has developed into a versatile character actor with acclaimed roles as a ruthless cowboy in 3:10 to Yuma, a troubled Iraq war vetern in The Messenger and a wild bank robber in Hell or High Water. Article content 'He is often cast as the very macho, madman kind of guy and this character starts off as meek,' Buxton says. 'So it wasn't obvious that this would be a role that was right for Ben and also a role that would appeal to him. This character spoke to him in a lot of ways. But, to me, there was no way of knowing that. But I love that he decided to do our movie because I think he brings so much interior life and mystery to the character. I find audiences love watching him and trying to figure out what this guy is all about.'
The Guardian
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Sharp Corner review – Ben Foster unravels in smart, darkly funny thriller
Stop me if you've heard this one before: happy family moves into dream home but discovers it's actually a nightmare. It's a setup so numbingly common that it's started to border on parody. From smug moving day pizza on the box-strewn floor to hearing louder and louder bumps in the night to arguing over when and how to leave, it's a descent that's propped up far too many genre films. At the start of Sharp Corner, which quietly premiered at last year's Toronto film festival, you'd be forgiven for expecting yet more of the same. But here, the threat is far more unusual and the nature of the unravelling far less predictable, the plot direction mirroring the title before it even comes into view. The move, from the city to the countryside, turns the McCall family into commuters, the tense sharing of just one car taking Josh (Ben Foster) to his thankless tech job and wife Rachel (Marvel survivor Cobie Smulders) to hers as a therapist, with their rather annoying son off to school. But within hours, as the couple enjoy a believably unsexy christening of the house, a car crashes on the corner in front, wheel smashing through the window, realtor-withheld secret revealing itself. The sharp corner they're now living on is a hotspot for accidents, more of which start to take place with variously distressing results. Except Josh isn't all that distressed, he's weirdly excited, dramatically recounting gnarly details at dinner parties and obsessing over the idea that next time, he might be able to do something about it. There's the potential here for a rousing study of a man trying to better himself by helping others, finding a calling through the power of doing good. But writer-director Jason Buxton has something darker and knottier on his mind. In what feels like a more fitting time than ever given the decaying state of the world, Sharp Corner is about the dangers of a mediocre yet entitled man whose desire for attention and affirmation sends him on a reckless downward spiral. For Josh, grimly recounting the horrors of his front lawn as the self-satisfied bearer of bad news isn't enough. He needs to insert himself, first by preparing to assist those affected – buying tools and learning CPR – and then, horribly, trying to cause the accidents instead. While some of Buxton's writing can be a little blunt and, in the initial stretch, some of the leaps a little rushed, we're kept firmly in his grip because, like a car crash itself, we can't stop staring at how horrifying it is and we're curious to see how much worse it might get. The uncomfortable places Josh ultimately finds himself might be harder to recognise but his journey there feels scarily familiar, a character we know all too well even if we wish we didn't. Josh is a man demanding that the world see him as something more than he really is and his pursuit of greatness, driven by ego, will risk the lives of others if needed because he's convinced himself, as with all great villains, that he's not a bad guy at all. Like The Kindergarten Teacher, it works best as a study of how dangerous mediocrity can be when someone refuses to accept what they'll never be. Being a good husband and father to Josh is all about the superficial performance of masculinity, not the far less showier day-to-day minutiae – it's less about what his family needs and more what he wants. He's a man who doesn't really know how to be one. And with men like Josh currently taking out the toll of their cavernous insecurities on the world, in offices they were never fit to be in, it's hard not to see this as unintentionally of the moment, a cautionary tale all the more effective by not taking a more specifically knowing aim. Foster, an actor who can often dial things up way too high, is far more grounded here and makes for a convincingly anonymous everyman. If the glamorous Smulders might not make much aesthetic sense as his wife, Buxton gives her character more texture than we might have expected, away from a nagging cliche and closer to someone credibly unsettled by whom she's found herself with. Josh's descent is cleverly spurred on by his own internal monologue, not one led by his wife. Buxton gains confidence as the film heads into the murky final stretch, neatly gliding around the, ahem, sharp corners that would have seen others crashing into the darkness. He leads his story to a knockout ending that's both hauntingly downbeat yet crushingly inevitable without going to new, unnecessary extremes. Unlike Josh, he knows exactly where he's going. Sharp Corner is out in US cinemas and to rent digitally on 9 May with a UK date to be announced
