SIFF 2016, day two: Identity crisis

Attending a film festival in a city as big as Seattle requires some juggling. It’s not enough to simply show up and watch movies: You have to figure out which films are playing at the theaters nearest you, and then you have to calculate how much time it takes to get from theater A to theater B.

I’m staying for a week on Capitol Hill with some gracious friends (thanks again, Curtis and Stefan!) who live a stone’s throw away from the Egyptian Theater. That might sound convenient, but the Egyptian doesn’t start showing films until the afternoon on weekdays. Most of the festival takes place downtown, and the next closest theater is a 15-minute walk away from where I’m crashing. And since most screenings require you to arrive at least a half hour early, you soon discover that you spend a lot of time simply standing around and waiting.

My schedule thus far hasn’t allowed for me to see quite as many movies as I’d ideally like (other work has conflicted with several of the press screenings), but that will change beginning today. But I still managed to check out two films on Tuesday, one a disappointment and the other a revelation.

“Complete Unknown” – I have a self-imposed rule that I like to call (for lack of a better name) the Michael Shannon Rule, which states that any film is immediately improved when graced with the presence of Oscar-nominated actor Michael Shannon.

That’s not to say that all films featuring Shannon are inherently good. Consider “Complete Unknown,” a shallow, too-solemn exploration of regret and heartbreak that requires Shannon to dial down his innate magnetism. He plays Tom, an agricultural analyst whose birthday party is interrupted by the appearance of a mysterious woman named Alice (Rachel Weisz).

Over the course of a particularly tumultuous evening, we learn that Tom and Alice (not her real name) have a history: He turned down her romantic gestures 15 years ago, and she’s been running from herself ever since, traveling the world and creating elaborate new personae everywhere she goes. She’s moonlighted as a surgeon, a teacher, a biologist and a Chinese magician’s assistant, which sounds less like the premise for a meditative personal drama than excised subplots from “Catch Me If You Can.”

Tom and Alice eventually break away from the party to walk and talk and opine on love and the nature of identity, but both characters feel more like dramatic symbols than real people. Director Joshua Marston (“Maria Full of Grace”) often shoots his actors in claustrophobic, handheld close-ups that render most of the frame deliberately ill-defined and bleary, a visual strategy that tidily sums up a film in which neither of its central characters come entirely into focus.

“Kilo Two Bravo” – While the dramatic stakes of “Complete Unknown” feel relatively low, they couldn’t be higher in director Paul Katis’ graphic war thriller “Kilo Two Bravo.” Based on a true story, the film centers on a group of British paratroopers stationed on a bluff overlooking Afghanistan’s Kajaki Dam in 2006.

During a routine operation in a dried-up riverbed, one of the soldiers steps on a landmine that blows off his leg. As the other men in the battalion run to his rescue, it’s discovered that the ground around him is riddled with buried explosives that subsequently take down several more soldiers. The rest of the film keeps us stranded in that riverbed with the wounded men, as the company’s medic tries to treat the injured men and as the other soldiers look on helplessly on the hills above.

“Kilo Two Bravo” doesn’t operate with the artificial urgency of an action film, moving instead with the rhythms and randomness of real life. Katis, screenwriter Tom Williams and the talented cast of mostly unknown actors have created a believable group of young men, and the hierarchies established within the camp feel authentic. And while the film is often unbearably bleak, the men use gallows humor as a way of coping with their predicament, ribbing one another even as they lay bleeding in the sand.

That this is Katis’ debut feature is a surprise. It’s remarkably assured filmmaking, an absorbing exercise in sustained tension. Every time somebody takes a step, you almost feel your body tensing up, anxious for another explosion to shatter the film’s otherwise unsettling silence. “Kilo Two Bravo” is unapologetically violent, and nearly every other word is an expletive, but when it reaches its emotional conclusion, the poignancy is more than earned.

(The film, originally titled “Kajaki,” is currently streaming on Netflix and is available for digital rental on Amazon and YouTube.)

Tomorrow: Two documentaries and a half-animated head trip.