Pranav Padmanabhan

To me, the skeleton key comes in the father-daughter scene in the car: "your punishment is to have to live with yourself." But more powerful than the admittedly occluded messaging about the psychic harm of self-reflection and the masks we wear to avoid it is Carax's treatise on film; the death of cinema will be its fixation on plot and lore coherence over emotional language. That the language Carax is developing sometimes resembles a shitpost is only to his benefit.