Stockton to Table Rock

Or: Checks and Deltas

High school senior Rori (Zoe Kelly) is doing her best. She has a SMARTgoals planner, Hailey her girlfriend (Gabrielle Lenberg) and hopes soon to slide out from high school into the real world. Unfortunately she also has to deal with her mother Shelly (Jessica Ires Morris), an alcoholic whose tumultuous relationship with her daughter keeps them both locked in orbit around each other. Now, in the final week of her high school career a run in with the harried school psychologist Ms. Laird (Brooke Burton) to break Rori free from orbit and hurl her into the unknown.

Based and shot in Boise, Idaho, Stockton to Table Rock has an unnerving coming of age story, pounding with anxiety. It circles in unexpected directions, never letting us guess what will come next. Morris brings a palpable danger to the scene sheathed inside her tiredness and flashing with hypocrisy a particularly jarring scene involves Shelley badgering a young Rori (Melina Kane) about calling her abusive, making her read from her laptop the various definition of “neglect”, “physical abuse”, “sexual abuse”, while scrolling right on past “emotional”).It ricochets like a thrown rock, fast and awkward and uncomfortable, but when it hits it bruises. Kelly and Morris are locked, not in battle, but in a spiral that winds mother and daughter tighter around each other though each is fighting to get further away. Nothing can be resolved, because nothing is resolvable; the way is long and the separation can only be sharp and swift.