A thick pink liquid goes on a blender – a sensory hell of cooking up American Thanksgiving dinner, the titular character in Trey Edward Shults’ Krisha (Krisha Fairchild) is helping as a way to atone. She’s been away from the family, returning and trying to get one on ones with these people, reluctant to reconnect. This includes a son (Shults) who hates her a mother (Billie Fairchild) who doesn’t know her. But despite her attempts at forgiveness, there’s a possibility that she may relapse and start drinking again. Any major screw up may lead the family to banish her again, losing any love towards her.

As much as this film is a character study, it’s also an examination of blurry class systems as from the beginning, we see Krisha losing herself in a sea of identical houses for the bourgeoisie. And even if she finds her way, the film depicts her and her family like aliens. Outside from Krisha’s addiction issues, she’s also a hippie convincing her son Trey to direct films. The rest of the family, despite being middle class, is brash in ways unfitting of this house. Everything’s askew in Krisha, especially in the body language of generations of a family with burning rage.

Krisha‘s central performance in Fairchild is astounding, meeting its reputation. but aside from the film examining class, it’s also a mirror to the Fairchild/Shults family. Most of the cast are real life relatives of a presumably artsy family. This film is much an ensemble piece and even Billie Fairchild, with dementia, is great here. Her scenes, like most of the scenes without Krisha, help the film breathe, ratcheting tension. The scenes with Billie are equally interesting as she talks to the family’s younger members. Both are oblivious to how Krisha and the other adults are carrying anger waiting to explode.

I can only imagine what it was like for Shults to direct Krisha Fairchild, his aunt, but whatever they did, their collaboration ended up being fruitful, fleshing out a character with complex emotions. She goes from yelling at a dog to apologizing, knowing that this a cycle she just can’t break. Shults lights and frames her naturally, again a woman either banished, hiding, yet brave. And sometimes, she’s tired of hiding and wanting love from a family who can’t love her. Krisha plays out its ending in two ways which one can chalk to a family with fractures and subjective viewpoints.

Stream Krisha on MUBI, which-