Stillwater (2021)

I went into Tom McCarthy’s first feature film since the Oscar winning Spotlight (2015) with some trepidation. The reviews of Stillwater have been pretty lukewarm, and the film has attracted criticism from Amanda Knox, whose story the film is very loosely based on. I must say I was pretty swept up by McCarthy’s take on it. Matt Damon is an excellent screen presence in my opinion, and although one could argue his Bill is simply a slightly different Jason Bourne, Damon adds a nuance to the character that works extremely well as Bill adapts to life in Marseilles. His daughter Allison (solid work from Abigail Breslin) was incarcerated five years ago in Marseilles, where she had gone to study, for the murder of a fellow exchange student (one that she had become very close to) and Bill splits his time between working construction back home in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and traveling to Marseilles to visit his daughter.

Some new evidence appears to come to light in the case while Bill is in Marseilles, and he chooses to stay there and find work, helped in his cause by single Mum Virginie (Camille Cottin) and her young daughter Maya, an utterly superb performance by child actress Lilou Siauvaud in her first feature film. Maya and Bill become very close, and you get the sense Bill is taking his chance to have some sort of meaningful relationship with the young girl, something he missed out on with his own daughter. In the second half of the film, I became more interested in Bill’s relationship with Maya and her Mother than with Bill and his own daughter. Despite Allison’s insistence of her innocence, I found myself caring less about these supposed clean hands (to the point where I was actively questioning them) as the film went on, and that surely is a flaw considering the films’ base story. However, the relationships distracting me from that drew me into them completely, and Bill’s own investigation into his daughters’ plight was far more interesting than whatever the outcome may be. McCarthy, like in Spotlight, is keen to get the truth across, but once he does so I had far more invested in other parts of the film to particularly care. Which is a shame because Stillwater is a good film, the performances are very solid, and although it is a stretch too long, it’s certainly worthy of a trip to the cinema. 7.4/10