Meadowland review – every parent’s nightmare

It’s every parent’s nightmare: you turn your back on your kid for two seconds and they disappear. They aren’t playing around, they aren’t hiding in the next room, they have vanished. In the first scene of Meadowland, it happens in a gas station bathroom that has a second exit into an empty garage, which leads to the parking lot, then an upstate New York roadway just busy enough that no one would notice a stray car creeping along.

The undercurrent of dread created by this first gripping scene never quite goes away, but it does mutate and change. After a cut to black, the panicked mom and dad (Olivia Wilde and Luke Wilson) are a year older, but in no way have readjusted to life. Their son, an adorable ragamuffin who was talking about cookies before the incident, has not been found. Mom (Sarah) is on lithium, but still works as a New Jersey middle-school teacher. (This affords us any number of close-ups on Wilde’s gorgeous eyes, staring into space while children recite very relevant Emily Dickinson poems.) Dad (Phil) is a beat cop in New York’s outer boroughs, who attends group grief-counselling sessions in a church basement. His no-good brother (Giovanni Ribisi) comes to stay with the couple in their cramped upper Manhattan apartment, which in a regular movie would lead to fights, or maybe a doomed affair. What Meadowland refuses to do, to its great credit, is conform to expectations.

Some might accuse it of being desultory, but the tone – a sustained, cruel sadness – feels right for the story’s shaggy elements. Everyone grieves in their own way, and maybe that means a year of denial for Sarah. It takes a good long while for the story to snap into place, but that’s usually the way life is, isn’t it? A lesser movie would go for easy scenes of catharsis, but Meadowland makes the more difficult choice. Luckily it has the goods to make the difficult journey worthwhile.

First-time director Reed Morano comes to Meadowland after a successful career as a go-to cinematographer in the upper tier of American indies. She makes terrific use of negative space in the frame (something’s missing, after all), and avoids cliche when shooting New York. Even heartbreaking, music-drenched wanderings and searches in Times Square are filmed in shallow focus, making the familiar feel a little alien.

Side characters weave in and out, including a boy with Asperger syndrome at Sarah’s school who you know is going to end up a key player, though you aren’t quite sure how. (I didn’t see it coming, but when it does it’s an “oh, of course” moment.) Elisabeth Moss is, at first, unrecognisable as a New Jersey floozy. Her one scene is reminiscent, albeit in a completely different context, of Mia Farrow’s remarkable transformation in Broadway Danny Rose. Another short scene with Juno Temple feels like a non-sequitur, but its slightly annoying presence is, in a way, a perfect mirror of our lost, confused characters.

Meadowland goes a little heavy on a recurring symbol for my tastes: the boy with Asperger’s is obsessed with pachyderms. I know an elephant never forgets, but I find it hard to experience a pure emotional release in the presence of a zoo animal. Luckily, the film goes all in on its twin strengths: Wilde’s outstanding, non-histrionic performance, and well-crafted sequences of ambience-heavy sound and image. I’ve seen scenes in other movies in which people in pain decide to cut themselves, but never before had I truly understood what they get out of it. Meadowland is powerful film-making, though, hardly light entertainment. And not one I’d recommend for date night – especially for parents leaving the kids at home with a new babysitter.