‘Cordelia’ Review: Going Underground

Some films settle on your skin and are difficult to shake off. Such is the case with Adrian Shergold’s “Cordelia,” a capricious psychodrama that, despite clear reminders of Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” (1965), is very much its own thing.

Cordelia (an excellent Antonia Campbell-Hughes, who shares the writing credit with Shergold), is an anxious young actor whose career was stalled by a traumatic incident on the London underground. Now she lives in a faded basement flat with her twin sister, Caroline (also played by Campbell-Hughes), whose flinty demeanor suggests a growing frustration with her sister’s ongoing mental issues. Then Caroline disappears for a weekend trip with her boyfriend, and the flat that was once sheltering now seems sinister, the ringing landline and flickering light bulbs exacerbating Cordelia’s disquieting dreams.

The possibility of romance with Frank (Johnny Flynn), a cello-playing neighbor, brightens the movie and softens Cordelia’s prickly personality. But Frank, too, seems off, his phone concealing creepy pictures of the sisters, whom he had thought were the same person. Venturing upstairs to Frank’s apartment, Cordelia finds it strangely decrepit, as if she inhabits the only livable space in a building that, like her sanity, is slowly decomposing.

Enigmatic and imperfect, but nonetheless absorbing and consistently unsettling, “Cordelia” offers a haunting visualization of a breaking-apart psyche. The bruised, green-washed elegance of Tony Slater Ling’s interior shots, rain sheeting against the flat’s windows, fashions an unreliable space where people and events could be real or imagined, alive or dead.

“I don’t know who I am,” Cordelia tells Frank. The wise viewer won’t expect her to find out.

Cordelia
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.