Affliction

It’s about ripping your bad tooth out with a pair of pliers over the sink, stifling any response as not to wake up or alert those around you. You spit up some blood and go sit in the living room with your piece of shit father while a snow as bleak as any continues to fall outside. The winter feels like it’s never going to end. Nolte and Coburn put in career best work here, their crumbling physicalities are so stunning. This is up there for me with the best of Schrader’s work too, just an unrelentingly dark portrait of poisoned masculinity in a small town. The Willem Dafoe stuff, while stilted feeing is essential to provide an outside perspective for a little repose. Probably wouldn’t have been made without Fargo doing well but there’s something so much more true about this in a way the similar winter movies of the era couldn’t hold a candle to.