SNAKE

A first-rate suspense thriller by actress/director Woronov (Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory, 1995), who has appeared in over 20 films, including Paul Bartel’s surreal Eating Raoul and Warhol’s Chelsea Girls.

Woronov’s fearless prose and plot surrealism bring to mind top suspensers like James M. Cain, but her stunning gift of simile is all her own. At the beginning, the reader has no idea that everything in the story may be coming from the mind of a schizophrenic. After all, Sandra—short for Cassandra—has the habit of lapsing into a stare that seems to let her see the future or to let her put things together that she might not otherwise know. Then, too, she has the animist’s vision of nature, with the wind and trees as living things, and the desert sand as death crystals hither and thithering about her feet. The narrative moves forward, then backward, like a glove reversing itself, until we are forced to ponder just how real the story is as we follow it over Sandra’s shoulder. She is, apparently, in a Catholic mental ward as she tells us about lighting out from Ohio, about her early days in L.A., then treating us to whip-smart dialogue from her nympho best friend Tanya; her S&M boyfriend Donald, whom Sandra may or may not have knifed to death; and from Luke, a yellow-eyed drug dealer who takes her under his wing on a big road trip to Idaho as they’re chased by “suits” bent on blowing them away.

If David Lynch wants a new script, send him this chunk of lost highway.