Carol Review

Haynes and Ed Lachman shot on Super 16, and the grain matters. The image is soft and constantly smeared by rain on car windows and shop glass, so we are forever watching these two through something, which is the film's whole method. Almost nothing is declared. A pair of gloves left on a counter starts the affair, a hand on a shoulder ends an argument, and the most erotic passage in the picture is a drive west taken by two people who will not say what the trip is.

Rooney Mara plays Therese as a watcher slowly becoming the author of her own life, a performance built from stillness that keeps threatening to break. Cate Blanchett gives Carol a poise that reads as armor until the lawyers' meeting strips it, where she stops performing and simply names what she is losing. Carter Burwell scores it like weather. The reticence has a cost, and there are stretches where the film keeps us as far outside as the period keeps its lovers, but that final look across a crowded room is as complete an ending as the decade offered.