Kali Reis
“CATCH THE FAIR ONE” My rating: B+ (Hulu)
85 minutes | No MPAA rating
Whatever your takeaway on the latest season of “True Detective,” it’s pretty obvious that Kali Reis is the show’s breakout star.
Reis is a professional boxer (holding several WBC titles) of Cherokee and Nipmuc ancestry. In the Max series she plays an Alaska state trooper working with Jodi Foster’s burned-out police chief to solve a mass murder — and, not coincidentally, to discover the truth behind the disappearance of a Native American woman.
It’s a pretty great gig for an acting newcomer. If you want to understand how Reis landed the job, took no further than her little-seen 2021 drama “Catch the Fair One,” now on Hulu.
In her acting debut Reis is more than just acceptable. She’s mesmerizing. Add to her performing chops the fact that she co-wrote the screenplay with director Josef Kubota Wladyka, and it’s easy to spot what the “True Detective” producers saw in her.
“Catch the Fair One” is essentially a revenge melodrama, but that description doesn’t do it justice.
The depth of the characterizations, the aura of tragic inevitability, the way in which horrible acts are made even more unsettling because they’re presented in such a matter-of-fact, non-exploitative manner…all these add up to a truly gripping and gut-twisting movie experience.
Trying to find another movie to compare it to, I keep turning to 1973’s “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” a crime drama so effectively rooted in semi-documentary reality that it has few peers.
In “Catch…” Reis plays Kaylee, a Native American woman whose life was upended by the disappearance a few years earlier of her younger sister, Weeta.
Kaylee’s road has been one big pothole. She’s only recently kicked a drug addiction. She trains incessantly at a mostly-male boxing gym where she’s ready to both dish out and absorb punishment. She sleeps in a woman’s shelter with a razor blade in her mouth.
Mostly she feels guilty. Weeta and Kaylee’s mother, Jaya (Kimberly Guerrero), is an activist who runs support groups for abused Native American women. Weeta was her hope for a better future; Kaylee is the black sheep who delivers nothing but disappointment.
Getting wind of a sex trafficking operation in their rural, snowbound neighborhood in upstate New York, Kaylee comes up with a dangerous plan…she’ll allow herself to be recruited into the prostitution ring in the hope of picking up Weeta’s trail.
It’s a desperate, last-resort move, and even a woman toughened by years of pain and abuse is horrified and terrorized by what she encounters.
If the film has a mesmerizing leading lady, it also has a firm hand behind the camera. Wladyka proves himself a master of mood…the film is a slowly-tightening vise of suspense and anxiety. Practically Hitchcockian.
And yet there’s nothing here that says, “Look at me, Ma.” No dramatic or visual grandstanding…which makes the yarn’s dark underbelly all the more disquieting.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 