Lace Crater

It would spill over into silly if not for the delicate performance of Burdge, who brings a palpable fragility and anchors the film with her sensitive, intensely physical performance.

It's a story that has its share of unnerving sequences, but like its pivotal character, it feels stuck between two worlds.

Slight though it may be, Lace Crater's mix of Andrew Bujalski-style naturalism and Roman Polanski-style body horror is at least off-kilter enough to keep one absorbed throughout.

What at first looks like a mumblecore comedy with a supernatural twist turns into something darker, and many viewers will not feel like going along for the detour into psychological horror.

Lace Crater elbows us to think about how quickly we dismiss "crazy ladies" - women who need things we can't give, who cry and mutter and glare and ruin parties

Ms. Burdge - all quicksilver emotion and exposed nerve endings - is an endlessly watchable focal point. Her character's vulnerability, uncertainty and growing self-acceptance lend the movie a necessary gravity.

A queasy demise is the best-case scenario on the other side of a one-night stand in Harrison Atkins' Lace Crater, a s-s-s-s-s-s-spooky and inventive indie debut that's best seen, if possible, in a packed theatre.

Atkins' modest means bely ambitious notions about the haunted self, drawing not only from the lo-fi snapshots of early comedies by Bujalski and Swanberg but, yes, even the psychological horror of Polanski.

Atkins continues to grow as a filmmaker with Lace Crater and it's inspiring and refreshing to see such an interesting person with peculiar points of view pursuing their vision.

Lace Crater is sometimes a comedy, sometimes a horror film, but at its core is something bleaker than either genre is ordinarily willing to contemplate.

The director ... puts together a picture that slyly has much more going on beneath its laid-back surface.

an impressionistic allegory, fusing horror with shame, in which sex has debilitating health and social effects-especially, unfairly, for women.