POSTHUMOUS

Zoe's drinking has become a problem, so she's abandoned her car, her boyfriend and temporarily moved back in with her surly, widower father—a man who's content to share meals and pay off her drunk driving fines, but seems to have little interest in emotionally connecting with his daughter. Zoe's mother died from a terminal illness after rejecting life-saving treatment that could have compromised her pregnancy, but before she departed, she had the foresight to leave behind a series of VHS recordings—concise messages of motherly wisdom meant to be viewed annually on Zoe's birthdays up to her 21st.

Resigned to the couch while her father's at work, Zoe spends her 30th birthday alone, rewatching the old VHS tape, charting her mother's decline from grainy message to grainy message, aware that her relationship with her mother has always been a one-way conversation through physical media that degrades a little bit every time she pops the tape into the family VCR. When a new lead points Zoe to the reclusive widow next door, and her father gets evasive about their shared past, Zoe breaks in and uncovers a failed occult therapy to channel her mother's pain through portals opened by arcane sacred geometry... and possibly, a way to finally converse with her mother through those same cracks.

Director Josh Tanner's debut feature is a chilling ghost story, with some genuinely creepy chills, twists, and jumps, but what stuck with me after the credits rolled was how thoughtfully Tanner uses Zoe's mother's analog VHS recordings to stand in for memory itself—subjectively captured and slowly wearing down each time it's revisited. (CHRIS LARSEN)