Her Smell Review

Her Smell is abrasive, irritating, noxious and hard to watch. Usually these are not characteristic that you would look for in a movie, but mumblecore breakout director Alex Ross Perry (The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip, Queen of Earth) makes it work.

Her Smell follows Something She, a fictitious ‘90s style riot grrrl band led by frontwoman Becky Something, played by Elizabeth Moss. Past their prime era of success, Becky Something brings to mind Courtney Love. She is hostile, self-destructive and an addict with a young daughter she is incapable of caring for. Elizabeth Moss leans into all of this, she plays Becky Something like a tornado, unpredictable and leaving a wake of destruction in her path. She is unafraid to make the character seem unlikable and often obnoxious.

The film is structed as a series of 5 long scenes taking place over a period of years and centering around the Becky Something’s relationships with her bandmembers (Agyness Deyn & Gayle Rankin) her ex-husband (Dan Stevens) the head of her record label ( a great performance by Eric Stoltz, who hasn’t been in anything in a while)

Her Smell comes during a bit of a wave of rock-star centric movies, Last year’s Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody and Netflix’s recent Mötley Crüe movie The Dirt. Both of those films had the real band members of the respective groups as producers on the movie and feel like they are presenting a highly sanitized and artificial version of those stories. Somewhat ironically, through creating a fake band and rock star, Alex Ross Perry is able to create something that feels more real.  

Where Alex Ross Perry’s previous films have felt like he was channeling Woody with relationship dramedies focused on self-absorbed neurotics. In Her Smell, He seems to be evoking John Cassavetes, with the cinema-verite style and the caustic nature of Moss’s character that brings to mind the same hard-to-look but harder-to-look-away energy of Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under The Influence.

Her Smell was shot on 35mm by Alex Ross Perry’s usual cinematographer Sean Prince Williams. Williams is one of only a few cinematographers remaining the predominantly shoots on film and Her Smell looks great. The nice natural grain imbues the naturalistic and not overly showy cinematography with a heightened sense of beauty.

Becky Something says repeatedly that she imagines herself dying on stage, and for the first half of the film that’s what it feels like it is building to. When she eventually does get clean, Moss becomes almost unrecognizable subdued, restrained, without the eyeliner and glitter the films slows to a deliberate pace to match this change. But there is an element of a ticking time bomb to her still, the music and the chaos are so intertwined, can she have the inspiration and image of one without the other.

The score by Keegan DeWitt is unpredictable, atonal filled with feedback sounds and creates a sense of dread and anxiety that hangs over scenes. There are original songs for Something She performed by Elizabeth Moss as well as Akergirls, another fictional, younger pop-punk group within the movie made up of Ashley Benson, Cara Delevigne & Dylan Gelula.