Robert Longstreet

Part crackpot mystery, part comic-book fable, ‘The Missing Girl’ is a low-key indie charmer that wears its big heart on its awkward sleeve.

If Terrence Malick had a twisted little sister, it would be Josephine Decker; the resemblance is clearly discernible in her sophomore feature, Thou Wast Mild & Lovely, utilizing Malick’s uninhibited and experimental handheld style but with her own dash of psychosexual drama. Decker’s story is framed against the backdrop of a quiet country farm, and shells out the kind of chills that not even Malick could muster.

The rustic, lyrical sophomore feature of writer-director Josephine Decker, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely proves as slippery and elusive a film as its characters do to one another. A work of atmospheric dread enhanced through loose editing and heightened colours and sound design, it opens with a sensual female voice discussing an unknown lover – “But the way my lover opened and closed my legs, the way my lover folded and unfolded me into my lover’s breast, my lover knows how to love me” – over the image of a perturbed, barking dog, this coming right after footage of a father and adult daughter playing in a field with a headless chicken, each with the exuberance of running puppies. What follows rarely deviates from that enigmatic prologue’s register.