‘The Burning Season’ movie review: an enthralling love story told in reverse
Sean Garrity parachutes the audience straight into The Burning Season with a cold opening of sorts, one that introduces two characters who don’t feature again until the final stretch of the narrative. As a result, the director instantly presents a mystery that demands to be answered, immediately piquing interest and curiosity for what’s to come.
What follows from that point on is a romance that plays out in reverse chronological order, segmented into different chapters that offer further insight into the torrid affair between Sara Canning’s Alena and Jonas Chernick’s JB. They can’t seem to stay away from each other despite both of them forming their own lives away from their annual dalliances.
Everybody has seen a love story told a thousand times in a thousand different ways on-screen, but by starting at the end and then working backwards, The Burning Season finds an ingenious method of exploring one of cinema’s most well-worn narratives from a fresh perspective. Initially, presenting the two leads as revelling in the thrill of extra-marital vice hypothetically makes them hard to root for. Still, through the performances and the gradual revelations that inform each subsequent chapter, it becomes something much more universal.
Alena and her husband (Joe Pingue’s Tom) are yearly visitors to the picturesque getaway run by JB and his partner Poppy (Tanisha Thammavongsa), with the first scene proper unfolding at the latter pair’s wedding. Why would JB invite the person he’s been having an affair with right under the noses of their respective beaus to his wedding? All becomes clear eventually, with new depths, layers, and complexities being added onto the central pairing minute-by-minute.
It’s an effective method of drip-feeding information that begins painting a picture of who JB and Alena are, why they’re so enamoured with each other, and what brought them together in the first place. All of this is rounded out by a prologue – that doubles as an epilogue – which recontextualises everything that’s come before to offer not just explanation but, in its own way, justification for their actions.
As its leading man, co-writer, and producer, Chernick’s investment in and connection to the material is apparent, while his familiarity with Garrity as a filmmaker brings out the best in both. Canning more than holds her own, too, ensuring Alena’s seemingly destructive self-gratification is rooted deeply in a past that doesn’t say any more than it needs to from scene to scene. All of this happens while maintaining an enigmatic grip on tension and intrigue that’s more akin to a thriller than a character-driven drama.
They’re bound together forever through a single inciting incident. Still, instead of having that overarching mystery drive the plot to weaponize later on as some kind of major twist, it unfolds entirely organically and serves as the catalyst for two separate lives plagued by half-truths, self-loathing, and misdirection who always find themselves intertwining through fate and circumstance.
It’s a breadcrumb trail well worth following throughout the years, directed and acted with such power and purpose that the conceit of watching the events unfold in reverse order is never pushed to the forefront as an example of style over substance. Sometimes, it’s the simplest approach that reaps the biggest rewards, and that most definitely applies to The Burning Season and its unwavering prioritisation of the two main characters, why they’ve done the things they’ve done, and what drove them there, to begin with.
