“I love a good psychological thriller,” Malin Akerman says, beaming through bright eyes and white smiles, though there haven’t been many psychological thrillers like The Aviary. The new (and first feature) film from writer/directors Chris Cullari and Jennifer Raite may be a great psychological thriller movie, but stands apart by taking the term ‘psychological’ quite literally. So literally, in fact, that the thrills exist solely as a byproduct of the characters’ states of mind, with the film actually beginning after the kinds of events most thrillers would spend their whole runtimes on.
Escaping The Aviary
The Aviary drops the viewer directly into a New Mexican desert setting after two women, Jillian (a mysterious Akerman) and Blair (an excellent Lorenza Izzo), have already made their secretive and daring escape from the titular cult. They’re initially in good spirits, excited about breaking free and prepared to make the three-day hike to civilization and start anew. Unfortunately, while they may have escaped the cult, escaping years of false beliefs and abuse is a different story. The audience quickly realizes that they are dealing with two unreliable narrators and that nothing may be what it seems.
Another aspect of The Aviary‘s iconoclastic position in the lineage of psychological thrillers is the fact that these two unreliable narrators are largely the only characters in the film. The suspenseful intrigue comes from the interactions between these women, who don’t fully know each other and might even not know themselves after years of horrific cult-like brainwashing.
As such, there is immense pressure on Akerman and Izzo to carry the film; they’re tasked with lifting the expert dialogue off the page and turning it into something more than a one-act play between two characters and a full-out psychological thriller. “It’s fun to get into,” Akerman says, “when you get a real character piece and get into the psyche of somebody who, in this case, has been brainwashed and is learning to trust themselves again, and the confusion that comes with that.” “How scary of a challenge,” Izzo agrees, “to get to dive into a struggle of the mind like this.”
Cults, Identity, and the Writer/Directors of The Aviary
The Aviary reflects the digitized contemporary, in which countless outside influences are constantly shouting their opinions and beliefs into the void of our collective psyches; there is a kind of brainwashing which occurs when one scrolls through social media or watches the news for hours. In addition to the screaming mass of the majority populace, there are also advertisers and politicians attempting to spread ideology. There is a wonderful exchange early on in the film, when Jillian and Blair compare their cult to the Girl Scouts, but not in any inherently pejorative way; the great dialogue questions the ideological structures we all take for granted.
“The issue of identity was a big draw for me,” Izzo adds, “getting to dive into the world that we live in today where there’s so much bombardment of information and influencers and ways to identify and understand who you are as a person and how to trust who to be around. I think there are a lot of cults and cult-type things that are all around us constantly.” How is a personality constructed? Is it solely from outside opinions and beliefs, combined with genetics and childhood environment? How much of a person’s thoughts are their own? These are some questions The Aviary provokes, a sure sign that the psychological thriller element of the film is working. Co-writer/director Chris Cullari puts it like this:
How do we all come to terms with our roles and systems that we’ve built our lives around that end up being destructive, because there’s so many. There are so many of those systems in our world, and it’s so easy to get lost, following anything, anybody, these days because they’re always in your face. It’s hard to know sometimes when you make a decision about something: are you making a decision about that because you feel that way? Are you making a decision about that because you’ve been reading Twitter all day and your favorite Twitter personality would have said to do this or that? So many people can get under our skin these days. It just felt pressing to try to find a way that have that conversation, and then the cult layer was sort of our genre way into a story format that people have seen, but maybe never in this way.
Co-writer/director Jennifer Raite agrees that the idea of a cult is very conducive to allegory, but they wanted to subvert the ways in which people have seen cults in recent films and television. “Both in narrative film and documentary [about cults], the audience brings a lot of judgment to it. Like, ‘oh, I would never do that, that could never be me.’ I think really focusing on the women and looking at it from a place of wanting to contribute, of wanting to be a part of something, felt more honest to us, and how you can really get lost even with the best of intentions.”
The Chemistry Between Malin Akerman and Lorenza Izzo
“It was really a wonderful script to begin with,” Akerman says. “The bones were there. Chris and Jen did a wonderful job writing it, and with a project like this, you have to be able to trust the people you’re working with. So when it all started really coming together, I think we got one of the best cast and crews, and that made it so enjoyable.” The chemistry between Akerman and Izzo is remarkable throughout, and despite the dark themes (and occasionally haunting imagery), the two women bring humor and charm to the roles, which makes sense considering just how funny they are. While both have done excellent comedies, Akerman was particularly brilliant in the absurdist Adult Swim show Children’s Hospital and Izzo was delightfully funny in Women is Losers. “You know, the laughs in between the takes [were important], because it was quite heavy.”
The aforementioned chemistry is what helps keep The Aviary from being overly bleak, but what also ensured not just the film’s success but the actor’s enjoyment of the process as well. “Working with Mailn was [great],” Izzo says, “it wouldn’t have worked if we hadn’t worked together, and we just had the best chemistry. You have to trust one another to do something as challenging as this. And I think that’s where all the laughs were so needed, and magically and naturally happened because it was that balance of doing something really heavy and having each other for support.” Akerman agrees:
We got so lucky, because it was an instant friendship, which was really important to believe that these women had spent some time together […] It was easy because Lorenza and I again had a great relationship and there were a lot of chats about what was happening. There were a few days, a few moments, where we just went, ‘I don’t know where we are right now. I don’t know where our brains are at,’ because the confusion was real. But that was part of it, and so luckily, we all had a great collaboration, and we took our moments to figure out what was going on.
“What really interests me is real connection with people in authenticity,” Akerman continues, and the viewer can sense that connection in The Aviary, both on-screen and off. “Everyone did their job and was doing the same work, was vibrating at the same frequency to achieve kind of the same thing, and that’s rare, but it can happen, and it’s kind of beautiful,” Izzo adds, and it’s especially rare that this kind of cinema was made during COVID. “I think I want to repeat, like, how wonderful it is for a movie like this, that it exists.” We were able to put together a small film smack in the middle of COVID,” Akerman says through smiles, “and we get to watch it in a few theaters now, which is kind of wild. To be able to talk about it even, it’s just a wild ride. It’s exciting.”
It’s exciting, indeed. The Aviary, from Saban Films, opens in select theaters and is on VOD on April 29.
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