Review: Matt Sobel's Enigmatic 'Take Me To The River' Plays Like A Waking Dream

This is a reprint of our review from the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

It’s a lonely and unforgiving road to take, but daring filmmakers often like to box us into challenging places. Michael Haneke has made an entire career based on bracing confrontation, and some of the best films of 2014 were engrossingly austere and demanding in presentation and form (“Under The Skin,” “Foxcatcher,” Enemy”). But we rarely see such taxing audacity from first-time filmmakers. Making his debut feature-length effort with “Take Me To The River,” Matt Sobel borrows a page from the uncomfortable school of filmmaking, but colors it with his own peculiar, but distinct, perspective. Controlled and self-assured, Sobel’s mysterious film is interested in the odd sensations of confusion, misperception, and misunderstandings. Played out like a genuinely strange waking dream, “Take Me To The River” plunges you into the cloudy waters of “what the fuck is going on?”

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