The psychological thriller that mixes rowing, 'Black Swan', and 'Whiplash': a fascinating movie of only 90 minutes

Movie fans love discovering hidden gems in catalogs, those that we can proudly recommend when someone asks us if we've seen anything interesting lately, because good things are better when shared.

A great example is the fascinating film we are here to talk about today, a debut feature that received five nominations at the Independent Spirit Awards - the most important awards in independent cinema - and three awards at the 2022 TriBeCa Film Festival: The Novice, written and directed by Lauren Hadaway, a semi-autobiographical story set in the world of collegiate professional rowing, in which this young filmmaker was a part of and knows well.

The film tells the story of Alex Dall (Isabelle Furhman, Orphan), a relentlessly competitive freshman student who sets out to join the novice rowing program at Wellington College. Jamie Brill, another freshman student, joins the rowing team but only as a means to secure a sports scholarship. Brill quickly qualifies as the 'best novice' on the team, fueling her obsession even more.

'The Novice'

'Whiplash' with shades of 'Black Swan'

This distressing and claustrophobic tale of obsession is inspired, as the director acknowledged in an interview she gave to EL ESPAÑOL in 2022, by Whiplash and Black Swan.

"I love those films and wanted to make my own version of the obsessed artist, but in my case it's not driven by an external force, like a demanding mentor, a controlling mother, or a specific goal, but rather everything is internal." 

"It's a story about obsession and the price to pay for perfectionism," explains the director, who defines her protagonist as "the heroine and the villain of her story," since there is no one pressuring her or reminding her of the goal she has to achieve.

'The Novice'

A film with its own style

"I had to get the viewer inside Alex's head," continues Hadaway. "Many of you probably have never experienced that level of obsession for something and I had to make you feel what the character feels." 

The stylistic proposal of the film is strong and powerful. The direction, sound, and editing are very effective at putting us in Alex's point of view, literally inside her head, so the rowing machine scenes are very important.

"I wanted each rowing sequence to feel different and tell something about how the character feels. Rowing is not the most popular sport, neither in real life nor in fiction, so I needed to make people who had never rowed feel what Alex feels," she points out.

For this, the director structured Alex's story with rowing as a love story. "An initial attraction, sparks of chemistry. Then there's the kind of awkward beginning, which we set up as the first time they make love, which is a sequence we shot in slow motion with 500 frames per second. Keeping that in mind indicated to us what the camera style, sound, and performances would be like."

The "crazy focus" 

"I wanted things to have a very shallow depth of field, so that she would go in and out of focus while rowing," she says explaining how they filmed the scenes, for which they used a lens that they accidentally discovered was broken. 

The director told us that with Todd Martin, her director of photography, they discovered that the background of the image came out "blurry and folded" when during makeup tests Isabelle Furhman started fooling around in front of the camera getting closer and farther away.

"Instead of replacing the lens, we liked the effect and decided to use it for those claustrophobic moments of Alex's break with reality where everything else disappears. It became Alex's "crazy focus". 

*This article has been automatically translated using artificial intelligence