Thou Wast Mild and Lovely

It's not uninteresting but too self-consciously arty to rank Decker as a mature filmmaking voice.

Ms. Decker especially likes to cut away from a shot just as or before it catches an actor's glance (or catches our eye). It's a device that risks growing mannered.

Traub's Sarah is fascinating, with an almost feral sexuality that makes her the most crucial component of the movie.

Our glimpses of what's already occurred and what will soon come are vivid and impressionistic, prophetic warnings about which everyone seems powerless to do anything other than silently observe.

Decker concocts a wholly enveloping vision of isolation told with a grimly poetic style that wanders all over the place but never stops playing by its own eerie rulebook.

Like most classic stories, this one is simple, but its realization is so surprising in its details, so original in its visual invention, as to make most other movies seem (at least temporarily) shot by the numbers.

The things she puts onscreen make you fear what's to come and yet you find yourself craving it as much as the characters do.

The film delivers an intriguing slant on rural-peril convention, even if it never completely remaps the old weird territory.

Thou Wast Mild and Lovely is as horrible as it is beautiful and that's just grand.

Decker's Thou Wast Mild & Lovely is certainly unique, if a kinda sorta sex thriller made in a nature-lovin', oddly edited, narratively dithering Terrence Malick manner counts as unusual.

Josephine Decker's dreamlike quasi-thriller of primitive psychology and goatish sexuality offers a setup that suggests 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' as filtered through Terrence Malick, but then proceeds at its own off-step pace.

Its connections run shallow, and most of its action-particularly in the over-the-top third act-feels spectacularly unearned.