Watching Laurie Collyer’s films, you can’t shake the feeling of impending disaster. It’s there in the characters she deploys: They’re down, one mistake away from being out. But its the films themselves, too — they always seem on the verge of taking their melodrama and gloom one step past what we can bear.
Take the opening scene of Sunlight Jr.: Melissa (Naomi Watts) wakes up on a rainy day in her less-than-glamorous room at the Floridian Inn. Her boyfriend, Richie (Matt Dillon), insists on driving her to work, only to have the car sputter to a stop when it runs out of gas.
The kicker comes when Melissa begins to walk the rest of the way: The wind dismantles her umbrella before she can take more than a few steps. Even when it comes to the small things, Collyer never lets her characters catch a break — a tendency that leaves her films at risk of wallowing in their own misery.
Sunlight Jr. follows on Collyer’s debut narrative feature, 2006’s Sherrybaby, and the two are of a piece. The earlier film’s protagonist is a heroin addict out on parole and trying to reconnect with her young daughter; in Sunlight, Melissa is a cashier at a gas-station convenience store, and she’s only narrowly avoiding a life like that of the alcoholics and vagrants who are fixtures in her life.