This thorny, morally complex documentary looks at the process by which an actor, Kate Lyn Sheil (best known for House of Cards), prepares for a role. Sheil has been cast in a film as Christine Chubbuck, a real-life news anchor who killed herself on live TV in 1974. It’s fascinating and wrenching to watch as the actor is sucked downwards into the depression that consumed her character. Interviews with colleagues and friends of Chubbock reveal something of her personality and mindset but, to Sheil’s relief, the actual footage of her death is never unearthed. The film is all the more intriguing when we begin to realise that it is not quite what it seems. A knotty, enigmatic puzzle of a picture, it is an exercise to interrogate the ethics of depicting a real life on screen. It’s troubling, ambiguous, at times queasily unsettling, and an experience that is hard to shake off.
