In the opening moments of Rachel Lambert’s Carousel, there is a profound sense of homecoming. The screen is filled with the comfort of a picturesque house and a white picket fence, framed by a score and cinematography that evoke the sense of a welcome invitation into the lives of its protagonists. We are introduced to Noah (Chris Pine), a divorced doctor in Cleveland navigating the delicate, often fractured terrain of single parenthood. He is a man existing in the quiet intervals between shifts at his late father’s medical practice and the weekends his daughter, Maya (Abby Ryder Fortson), spends with her mother. Pine plays Noah with a weary, fatherly warmth, particularly in the small moments, like a steadying hand on Maya’s shoulder as she buckles under the crushing weight of high school expectations. Maya, portrayed with a raw, unmoored intensity by Fortson, is the film’s most immediate source of tension. Her sudden outbursts of anger and mental exhaustion hint at a deeper pain from her parents’ divorce.
However, the arrival of Rebecca (Jenny Slate) into this orbit causes the film’s narrative machinery to stumble. Rebecca is a woman from Noah’s past, recently returned from a soul-sucking career in D.C. to take a break, care for her parents, and renovate her childhood home. While Slate and Pine possess a connection that feels hypnotic and genuine, the script fails to provide the architectural support their chemistry deserves. We are told they share a history that once ended in significant pain, yet the film keeps the audience at a frustrating distance.
Carousel Review: Sundance Film Festival
The history between them feels like an inside joke we aren’t privy to. Their arguments signal a well of ancient hurt, yet without context, their dialogue often feels like shorthand for a movie we haven’t seen. Noah stayed because Rebecca didn’t ask him to go with her, but with the decades of life that happened in the interim, we need depth and insight into this past to understand why the pair would continue to carry these feelings.
This lack of narrative precision extends to the film’s structural transitions. Rebecca’s move from D.C. is a curious fumble; the film is so hurried in its exposition that it becomes barely comprehensible how she suddenly pivots from a job in government to becoming Maya’s debate teacher. Similarly, the subplot regarding the financial instability of Noah’s practice is introduced but never truly explored, leaving the stakes feeling skeletal rather than life-altering.
Lambert is clearly a director with a sharp eye for the charming tone of indie drama, and Carousel is at its most articulate when it stops trying to explain itself and simply flows through moments. There is a sweet, almost melancholic beauty in the scenes where the characters simply exist in the same space. However, when compared to Lambert’s previous Sundance standout, Sometimes I Think About Dying, this latest effort feels like a notable step down. In her earlier work, Lambert displays a masterful ability to find the profound within the mundane, using silence and internalized performances to create a deep, resonant connection with the isolated and the introverted. In that film, the smallness of the world feels like an intentional, intimate choice; here, that same quiet feels more like a narrative void. While Sometimes I Think About Dying succeeds by making the unsaid feel heavy with meaning, Carousel uses its silences to skirt around the very history it needs to explore. For a film so focused on the idea of lost love, it rarely allows the audience to feel the genuine weight of that loss, opting for an aesthetic of grief rather than the soul-aching reality of it.
We see the surface of Noah and Maya’s struggles, but the film refuses to dive into the depths of their grief for a father and grandfather, or the true impact of the divorce. In the end, Carousel feels like its namesake: a beautiful, ornamental experience that moves with a smooth, practiced rhythm, but ultimately leaves you exactly where you started: in front of that house and white picket fence with inhabitants that don’t really want to extend a welcome invitation.
Grade: C+
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Carousel
A divorced doctor’s carefully constructed life in Cleveland is upended when his daughter’s debate aspirations and the unexpected return of a past love force him to confront his own choices and embrace a second chance.
