El Maestro Jardinero

In a 2022 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Paul Schrader spoke about how the style of the film serves to create an atmosphere of unease and unfamiliarity: "Well, there is a coldness; there's a withheld-ness - in the performance, in the production design. There's not much furniture around, and what's with those jellyfish on the wallpaper? So there's a kind of distance, which is intentional. And that little room he lives in, which makes no sense. So, yes, you're using those stylistic elements to make the viewer feel that there is a gap between what you want to feel and what you do feel. And that's a calculated gap that you create stylistically - sometimes by use of the camera, more often by not using the camera, by not giving certain things. It creates a sense of unease, that makes you feel, 'this could be a story I know very well, but somehow I'm looking at it and I don't think I know it very well at all.'

The pudding Narval eats at his dinner with Norma grows back into the plate when the camera angle changes, than vanishes again at the last shot from afar.

Featured in Kermode & Mayo's Take: Master Gardener, Hypnotic, the Gallows Pole, Shane Meadows + Sophie McShera (2023)