Before anything, “THIS MOVIE WAS MADE BY ONLY TWO PEOPLE” flashes on the screen. And Her Body Was Never Found wants its audience to be aware of the metatextual relationship you and it share, and this movie is meta as hell.
And Her Body Was Never Found is about a couple that hikes into the wilderness to make a movie about their relationship, a relationship fraught with arguing, gaslighting, and abuse. It starts with a very unsexy sex scene that transitions into what feels like a real argument between two real people (two people who need to completely change how they communicate and desperately require therapy as soon as possible) eventually leading to attempted murder (real or perceived?), and from there the film blurs the line between fiction and reality in a tumultuous mix of found footage and constructed narrative.
Meta has been a pretty tired word of late, with cute winking superheroes dominating our cinemas. And Her Body Was Never Found didn’t feel tired, as the movie constantly wants you to engage with how it’s constructed. It consistently highlights the limitations of what the filmmakers put themselves through, and there’s a certain moment about thirty minutes in that recontextualizes this “meta insistence” that lit a fire under me and had me lean in.
If you can get through the first half hour of genuinely upsetting arguing followed up by gaslighting and mental abuse, this line blurring is incredibly engaging. It’s sometimes funny (there’s a recurring bit about luna bars) but I think the miserable nature of these people could’ve been mediated with a bit more humor. The movie starts to strain slightly towards the end, and you can feel the constraints and the filmmakers butting up against the requirements of a feature length narrative, but I left feeling inspired.
It’s inspiring seeing something attempting this level of complexity made by just two people. And Her Body Was Never Found is exactly why you go to film festivals, to see something new and fresh and made through sheer will. In the worst case a movie like this is a purely technical exercise, albeit a fascinating one with a fun premise, but in this situation it helps that the movie is actually good.
