SHARP CORNER - Mark Reviews Movies

Sharp Corner, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 8, 2025

Their new house looks like a dream—away from the bustle of the city but not too far away for a commute, with plenty of space, on a quiet street, with big yards where the couple's child can play. There's just one problem, which Josh (Ben Foster) and Rachel (Cobie Smulders) discover on their first night in their new home. That's when a car hits the tree in the front yard, and the impact sends one of the tires crashing through the window.

Sharp Corner takes this shocking moment, the resulting trauma experienced by the family, and the constant fear that something like this will happen again, and writer/director Jason Buxton makes an increasingly unsettling character study out of those circumstances. This situation is bad enough for Josh, Rachel, and their young son Max (William Kosovic), who each react to what happened, as well as what does happen again, in distinct ways.

Rachel won't talk about it, except to question if living in the house is still a good idea, because the thoughts surrounding the accidents are too horrible to consider for long. The boy, meanwhile, lives in regular fear that such occurrences will keep happening.

As for Josh, he's morbidly fascinated by the first accident. It kills an 18-year-old who just graduated high school, played football well enough to earn a college scholarship, and is mourned by many, especially his family, who leave a memorial in the grass next to the sharp turn that the young man, who was drunk, didn't slow down to take. Josh begins researching the victim online, telling friends from the city who come over for dinner about the young man's life and the grisly details of his death. Maybe this is just Josh's way of processing the trauma of what he saw, but eventually, the very idea that a similar car accident could and likely will happen again in front of his house overtakes Josh's life.

Such is the basic setup of the story, adapted from a short story by Russell Wangersky. The fascination and tension of it are in watching Josh, an otherwise ordinary and seemingly dull kind of guy, escalate his own role in the aftermath of the accidents, his potential to do something about them, and, inevitably, one final step that takes his little thought experiment and preparation out of the realm of the hypothetical.

The character almost seems to need this tragedy just within the periphery of his existence. It could be about being a kind of tourist in pain and grief without actually experiencing it. It could be that he sees his life, having some theoretical ideal of a happy home life and a job working in the tech side of some marketing department, as boring and unfulfilling in a way he can't properly communicate. Perhaps, his newfound obsession with car crashes and figuring out ways to prevent them from happening or to save lives when they do, as noble as those intentions might seem, has something to do with him finally taking control over some part of himself and everything around him.

His motive is a bit of a mystery, since Josh isn't the type of person to speak openly about his thoughts and emotions (He sees a therapist, played by Jonathan Watton, at one point, and only says enough to get a sense that his new, twisted hobby is about power for him to some extent). In the hands of Buxton and Foster, this character makes uncomfortable sense on each and all of those levels. We just watch as his curiosity slides into obsession and that obsession becomes all-consuming, leaving Josh to spend apparently every waking moment with the thought that he could save a person's life and that, if he does, his own life might mean something more than who he is and what he has.

Josh's plans start with relatively simplicity and basic common sense, as he notices that a sign warning of the sharp turn is obstructed by overgrown brush. He takes a chainsaw to the branches, and things seem to settle down a bit—although Josh keeps his eyes looking out the window and perks up his ears whenever a vehicle approaches the house. Then, there's a hit-and-run incident outside the house one night, and Josh can only stand by and watch as the victim slowly dies in front of him. That's when he starts taking CPR classes, buys a mannequin of his own for practice at home (which he hides out of fear or shame of being caught), and comes up with excuses for his wife and boss so that he can spend even more time at the house.

The progression of Josh's way of thinking, from passive eyewitness to tragedy to scheming more ways to possibly become an active participant in it, is the key to the psychology, drama, and suspense on display here. Everything—from the visceral severity of the accidents to Josh's behavior—escalates in a believable way, and even when some of it might seem like a stretch, Foster's quietly intense performance (He really is one of the best actors who work in that register) fills in the gaps and keeps Josh's actions grounded in an understandable, if progressively unnerving, sense of what this man wants.

Buxton injects this tale with a certain level of irony, too, as Josh's life crashes in its own way on account of his fixation. That element is not meant to be amusing or sardonic, though. It's just another layer to the way Sharp Corner depicts the harsh reality and inevitable outcome of obsession.

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