On learning that her infant niece, Maya, is dying of a rare disease, newly pregnant Sharon decides she must return home to Buffalo, N.Y., to help out -- but instead, she steps into a hornet's nest of family turmoil. While Maya deteriorates, another crisis erupts when Karen -- Maya's mother -- becomes pregnant with the child of a former gang member in this cinema verité-style portrait of a family on the brink.
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Reviews
I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.
Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .
There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.
The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
Samantha Buck's film '21 Below' tells the story of an ordinary family with extraordinary problems: a daughter who takes up with a terminally useless man, falls out with her mother (a woman who cannot let go of problems she does not own), and has a child of her own who is diagnosed with a terminal disease. Both mother and daughter also appear to be suffering from signs of depression. All of this is very tragic (albeit in a low-key, unpoetic sort of way); why the protagonists wanted to be shown on film is anybody's guess. The narrative follows the ostensibly sensible older sister as she tries to mediate between the different wings of her family. But while she does come across as sensible, she lacks any special insight and when, as the end of the film, she talks about having gone on some kind of internal journey, it's not clear what that is supposed to have been - her own tale lacks the substance to give structure to the film as a whole (which appears to have been the directors' plan). This film is not awful, but it is painful, and there's not much more I could draw from it than the familiar lesson that people are often simply bad at life.
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