White Reindeer
Accent Film Entertainment is pleased to announce the release of the Christmas black comedy White Reindeer. Written and directed by Zach Clark and starring Anna Margaret Hollyman, this acerbic take on the holidays is out now on Blu-ray and DVD.
Suzanne (Hollyman) is a prosperous real estate agent living the newlyweds dream in affluent suburban North Virginia. The promotion of her weatherman husband to a post in Hawaii is short-lived in celebration, however, when he is murdered in a home invasion. Sudden bereavement casts Suzanne adrift in the earnest atmosphere of the yuletide season. Bah humbug! Cue the sympathetic work colleagues singing carols at her door. Lonely are the lights of the newly acquired Christmas tree. Soon the Christmas countdown for Suzanne seems like transparent consumerist insularity. It’s not long after that she learns of her deceased husband’s affair with an African-American exotic dancer and his dubious search history online. When Suzanne makes contact with the stripper White Reindeer hits another gear.
Awakening from suburban slumber is swift. Booze and excessive online purchases make way for cocaine and shoplifting. The new neighbours hold sex parties. Suzanne doesn’t know what she wants and so she tries it all on. Winner Best Film at the Boston Underground Film Festival and nominated for the Audience Award at the Cork International Film Festival, White Reindeer, exhibits the ribald, unpredictable and unhinged vision of filmmaker Zach Clark, who brings Douglas Sirkian gravitas to the often offbeat and alienating mood. A graduate from the North Carolina School of Arts like contemporaries David Gordon Green (Joe), Chad Hartigan (This is Martin Bonner), Jeff Nicholls (Mud) and Aaron Katz (Cold Weather), Clark is the natural satirist from that group as he explores the ways modern rituals inform tragedy and vice versa with sly wit and humanity.
“If nothing else, this is the least festive Christmas movie since Bad Santa, dissecting the absurd belief that the holiday season can somehow magically cure all ills.” – The AV Club Hollyman, who stars in Summer of Blood and the upcoming Mark Wahlberg desert odyssey Mojave is equal to the demands of the role. “The film executes its bad-taste gags with such delicacy and unexpected emotional truth that they don’t even seem like jokes,” writes Nathan Rabin in The Dissolve. “This is attributable largely to Hollyman’s fearless, convincing lead performance, which grounds the movie in a believable reality, no matter how crazy things become.”
“White Reindeer eagerly pokes the mythology surrounding the holiday season narrative to find something hauntingly beautiful lurking beneath it,” observes Eric Kohn in IndieWire. “This complex, compassionate film finds both wicked humour and, less expectedly, transcendent hope in America’s gaudy fixation with Christmas spirit,” notes Guy Lodge in Variety. “If nothing else, this is the least festive Christmas movie since Bad Santa, dissecting the absurd belief that the holiday season can somehow magically cure all ills,” writes Mike D’Angelo in The AV Club.
White Reindeer is available now.
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