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| Kryptic |
A mysterious disappearance in the woods. The search for a mythical monster. A broken down marriage crushed by obsessive control, and a woman’s confrontation with herself. Kryptic, which screened at SXSW 2024, is a puzzle of a film, not just for the audience but for its central character, who struggles to remember her own identity even as she connects with deeper aspects of who she is.
That woman, Barb, is played by Chloe Pirrie, and I caught up with her and director Koutrney Roy at the start of the festival. Both were in high spirits, in part because this is Kourtney’s first feature and it has done very well to get this far.
“One evening over drinks, Paul [Bromley] said ‘I want to write a film for you,’” the director tells me. “I'm kind of naive. I said, ‘Oh, like a short?’ He was like, ‘No, a feature. I'm going to base it on your photographic world, and it'll be a film made for you.’ I was like, ‘Okay.’ And so we just sat down and went through ideas of what we would like to see in a film. I had my ideas and he had his, and we put them all together, and then he went away and started writing.
“He'd come back and consult me and show me what he'd done, and then he very graciously would take my suggestions or allow me to fiddle around with it, and then he'd go back and continue writing. So it was a very slow building block process. I was always intricately part of it.
“It definitely began with the monster. I said ‘Okay, I want supernatural elements. I want a monster.’”
How did they decide what the monster was going to be and what it was going to look like?
“Oh my God. That was actually quite long and sort of slow, because when you're writing it can be anything, and then all of a sudden you have to come up with something. I had lots and lots of references. I gave it to the VFX people and they were really excited about it, and I just let them do whatever. They showed up on set with the monster and I was like, ‘Okay.’ I didn't know what it looked like. It was very nail biting, but very talented. They were amazing. Just trust them. Just let them do their thing, and whatever they're going to give you is going to be amazing.”
I ask Chloe if it helped, from an acting point of view, that she were suddenly encountering a monster without having known what it was going to be until quite late.
“Yeah, it did,” she says. “And also because some of the scenes I have with the monster are so intense and strange. But the technical aspect of all of that becomes something like a stunt. You have to just wrestle with the technicals of it. And they were an amazing team. They'd rigged up all these things that were coming out of me or coming out of a thing I was interacting with, which was sort of strange. What was that thing? It was like a puppet box that we had to be in, a cavity that we had to go in.”
“Covered in mucus,” adds Kourtney helpfully.
“It was physically very interesting to explore that, and freeing and ridiculous,” Chloe continues. “It was really cool. But it's such a statement. So as an actor, you kind of can't really make a wrong move because that's going to say so much in the best possible way.”
Did she know what she were getting herself into when she first got on board with the film?
“Not necessarily, but I think once I actually met Kourtney, I started to understand that it was going to go to extremes. I was really happy about that because it’s an acting challenge. It's reassuring that all of that world is being taken care of and rendered by people who really know what they're doing. I just had to work on finding an arc and the emotional truth of what's happening, and finding the extremes of her and finding the moments in the film where she's really just a person in conflict with something, either herself or her situation or her environment. And then obviously, the more intense, more shocking moments are a different kind of challenge. So, yeah, from the script, I read in a way that was like, ‘Okay, this is wild.”
There are times when she doesn't really know what's happening to her and she has problems with her memory. How does one play somebody who doesn't really know who they are?
“I think I just leaned into my knowledge of illnesses around memory loss, amnesia, and then also just moments – we all have times in our lives where we're not ourselves or we struggle to remember, like brain fog or whatever. These are really human experiences that all of us experience at different times in our lives for different reasons, whether it's like an accident or whether it's menopause or whether it's being hit on the head with something or waking up from an operation – these are things which I've experienced. You just lean into that. I mean, Barb interacts with alcohol a fair bit in the film, and that's another aspect of it. There was so much in the script for me. Is she drunk in the scene or is she just confused? Or is she feeling so anxious that it creates that kind of situation?”
Her obsession with monster-hunting is also intriguing. Is it because she's in such an uncomfortable domestic situation? Is she trying to find something else so she can reassure herself that the world is a bigger and more exciting place than that?
“When we walked onto the set where we see her actual house, that was amazing,” Chloe says. “I was like, ‘This is terrifying.’ Such a terrifying house this woman lives in! That gave me so much in terms of, like, this is someone who is fearful, wants to be liked, has conformed probably a lot until this point, and has become unleashed and is in touch with her sexuality as well, in a way that the other environment was showing me. This person was shut down. That was something that I just discovered through the designs.”
Traditionally in folklore, there's this idea that people go into the woods and discover secrets there. Sometimes secrets about themselves. But actually shooting in the woods is quite a challenge for a director.
“That was probably not the most challenging days,” Kourtney reflects. “We're using mostly natural light. There's not huge set-ups, but it took a lot sometimes to find the right forest space. You think ‘We’ll just go in the forest and shoot it.’ But, you know, we need a clearing, we need this, we need that. So there was a lot of challenge for that. But I don't know – I think when you talk about discovering yourself in the forest, there was more to discover in the home at the end. Yes, the forest is scary, but the domestic home is really terrifying.” actually.
“We did a number of things with the production designer, creating a very overly clean, perfect house. Everything in a terrible kind of dull taste. We wanted it to feel like it was oppressive. And with the DP, it was like shooting at slightly different angles. It's not like crazy angles, but angles that are lower or from far away, through windows and things like this, to destabilise a bit more. And then even with sound design – it was actually a big challenge for the sound designers, in a good way. Doors don't creak, things don't drip, because this guy is a maniac and everything is fucking perfect in his house.
“I kind of let them do their thing,” she says of the actors in those scenes. “They were very talented. It was in the casting, and then we just trusted them to do it. I didn't actually really have to do that much. They had it already.”
“Yeah, we just kind of immediately both seemed to understand what this relationship was,” says Chloe. “And the control, but not control in a traditional way. He can't hang on to her now because this is a person who's been estranged from themselves and then has met themselves in a way that is irrevocable. And so it's really painful, actually, watching him try. That's what Jeff brought so brilliantly to the part. It's something that could be quite black and white, but he brings this vulnerability to it where you really feel his pain. They've reached the point of no return.
“It was so much fun to play around with that in the relationship, and we had really great intimacy coordinators as well, to help us kind of find the dynamics of that in some of the more physical scenes. That was really great because it allowed us to treat those scenes with all of the analysis that the other parts of the great script have.”
Is his vulnerability important to bringing out the more monstrous aspects of her character as well?
“Yeah, definitely. And it's really something that she kind of switches and enjoys playing with, I think, parts of it. And I think it's fun seeing her start to play mess around in the anarchy of being in the marriage like that and the anarchy within suburban kind of, as Courtney says, like, dull, controlled environment, whatever you want to like anarchy, kind of invading that space is very fun to watch, always is on film.”
We talk about the colours in the film.
“I love the red motif in the green,” Kourtney says. “It's just such a beautiful colour. And I really love Don't Look Now.
They talk further about how much they enjoyed the shoot, and I ask how they feel about the film naking it to SXSW.
“Very excited. I'm over the moon, personally,” says Kourtney.
“Yeah, me too,” says Chloe. “I'm really thrilled. I've never been to the festival before, and it just felt like it was the perfect festival for the film to be at.”
