Miranda Veil (2020)

Miranda Veil is a wonderfully schizophrenic film — a morbidly twisted love story, a peyotized road movie, and a deranged black comedy all rolled into one. There is madness here, but it has a method.

The filmmakers are unafraid of being politically incorrect, but they don’t like to shock just for the sake of shocking, either. This a refreshing combination. It takes guts to make a comedy in which a woman is beaten, flogged and stabbed, her face crushed by a rock, and her head split open with an axe, etc., etc., etc.

The film’s treatment of all this violence, however, is nothing short of masterful. When it's, so to speak, real, it's hinted at; it happens off-camera, and we only see the results. It only becomes overtly graphic around the point where the film crosses an imaginary line between realism and surrealism, and then it goes so over the top that taking it seriously would be missing the point.

Contrary to what might appear on the surface, Miranda Veil is not misogynistic — or misanthropic, or nihilistic; unlike, say, Happy Death Day, or Palm Springs, or Happy Death Day 2U, where the difference between life and death is the same as between sleep and wakefulness, and where the world reset every 12 hours of less, Miranda Veil boasts a deep concern for the mystery, meaning, and purpose of Life in general, as well as a philosophical respect (not coincidentally, the male lead is named after Kierkegaard, regarded as the first existentialist philosopher) for the inviolability of each individual life.

All things considered, the three adjectives Soren uses to label the titular Miranda(accessible, unpredictable, intriguing) may be used to describe the movie — well, maybe not so much 'accessible' (its idiosyncrasies might put some people off), but then this is a film of which you can say that it’s not for everybody, and mean it as a compliment.