Three New Slow-Burn Films Outlive Their Running Times

The mark of a good paper isn’t that it moves the reader emotionally, or that it convinces the reader of a clear-cut argument. Rather, the best papers discuss complex issues with an accessibility that makes it applicable to the world outside the confines of the pages on which they are written.

Put simply, the best papers live inside the reader’s mind for much longer than their page count.

The same can be said of the best slow-burn films.

The Power of the Dog is one of those films. My initial reaction when the end credits rolled was lukewarm. The film never reached the emotional climax that I desired, and that I felt the beginning had set it up for. But the next morning my first thoughts were about that film. I realized I was still grappling with the questions and conflicts that film had posed.

Slow-burn films, as opposed to more conflict-driven films that rely heavily on a strong plot to entertain, require more patience to be understood and appreciated. They never reach the emotional climaxes that a traditional plot structure does, and instead expect the viewer to play a more active analytical role. This, of course, has led the most pretentious film-watchers to view them as “higher” art. Personally, I don’t subscribe to any caste system for art forms or genres, but I can recognize that slow-burn films serve a different purpose for viewers than other films.

In the case of The Power of the Dog, the purpose is an exploration of modern masculinity. Set on a wealthy ranch in rural Montana in 1925 ⁠ — an environment that is at the crossroads, in both time and space, of old-fashioned and new age notions of what it means to be a man. Jane Campion, in her first feature film since 2009, raises far more questions in the film than she answers. She utilizes each character’s existence like an argument, and there are moments when you find them in contention, but you never get the sense that one is correct. In the end, though, you do get the sense (at least for the time being) that one has won.

The same could be said of Passing, an exciting debut film from Rebecca Hall, that also utilizes a slow-burn effect to explore the Black experience in 1920s New York. Tessa Thompson, Ruth Negga, and André Holland all give stellar performances as characters who all come at race from a different perspective. Each person’s ability to ⁠ — and desire to ⁠ — pass as white has dramatically affected what they want and expect from the world. In the end, Hall makes no clear-cut thesis, but instead offers a refreshing framework to understand the incredibly complex issue of race in America.

Meanwhile, another directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, utilizes a much more internal struggle to present the varying perspectives and feelings about motherhood in a similarly slow-burn fashion. Maggie Gyllenhaal presents the story of Leda, a middle-aged professor with two adult daughters, who becomes obsessed with a young mother who seems to be struggling with the same things she did early in her career. She loves her children, but at the same time wonders if she would be better off without them, and then feels guilty for feeling any shame in motherhood at all.

It’s a refreshingly honest take on motherhood, one that film very rarely shows. In the end, The Lost Daughter says more about the effects of that psychological struggle than about what motherhood “should” be, and that’s precisely the point. Admittedly, of the three films, I struggled with The Lost Daughter the most. Gyllenhaal uses silence frequently to reveal the character’s emotional conflicts, but those silences are often more awkward than revealing.

Still, The Lost Daughter left me with the same slow-burn pondering that The Power of the Dog and Passing did. All three outlive their running times, and in my book, that makes them incredibly effective.

For what it’s worth, all three are also on Netflix.