Lavender

[projekktor id=’25913′]

The psychological thriller Lavender, directed by Ed Gass-Donnelly, is a Canadian feature that premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. The film stars Abbie Cornish, Dermot Mulroney, Justin Long, Diego Klattenhoff, Peyton Kennedy, and Lola Flanery.

When a photographer (Abbie Cornish) suffers severe memory loss after a traumatic accident, strange clues amongst her photos suggest she may be responsible for the deaths of family members she never knew she had. Long plays a psychiatrist who helps her recover lost memories.

While it does feature some of the genre’s qualities, Gass-Donnelly doesn’t think of Lavender as a horror film. “This is just me being pedantic, but “capital H horror” is the kind of horror that I don’t like—I associate it with gore,” he says in an interview with NoFilmSchool.com. “[In that kind of] horror, the primary purpose of it is just to scare you. Whereas this was a movie about something that happens to be scary. It was always a character piece about this woman confronting her demons. We wanted it to be a terrifying experience, but it was much more driven by theme and character. That was the balancing act. It’s a constant wrestling; we want to make sure we’re delivering on the promise of genre, but we don’t ever want to be pandering to genre.”

Lavender is rated 14A.