Sundance Review: Ricky D’Ambrose’s ‘The Cathedral’

deadline.com:

Rarely has a filmmaker kept his central character at such a distance as writer-director Ricky D’Ambrose does in The Cathedral.

This is clearly an autobiographical work in some very important ways, and no doubt a purging of some demons as well. And yet the kid here, whose life the film follows from birth to his acceptance at college, has very few lines of dialogue and for the most part remains a cipher.

All the same, this is a penetrating look at childhood that, distinctively, focuses more than anything on the foibles and shortcomings of the child’s parents, particularly his father.Workshopped at the Biennale College Cinema program in 2020-2021 and world premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival, this fastidiously crafted work creates a sharply selective portrait of clueless parenting that one can only imagine will require years of intensive therapy from which to recover—or, if D’Ambrose is lucky, perhaps making this film will have done the trick.This is a particular, eccentric piece—one that, for example, uses “action” movie music to briefly backdrop a chess match–but its novel narrative approach and rigorous discipline will impress anyone who might think that just about anything that can be said about the trials of growing up has already been aired.The passage from little kid to young adult is the ostensible subject here, but point of view plays an equally significant role in how you receive and digest all the information dispensed in this intensely personal autobiographical account of growing up in comfortable yet highly fraught circumstances.A female narrator dispenses intimate information about the ostensible protagonist, Jesse Damrosch.