Rating: NR | Runtime: 75 minutes
Director(s): Polaris Banks
Writer(s): Polaris Banks & Mor Cohen

I just wanted a LUNA bar!

At one point during And Her Body Was Never Found, when Keren (Mor Cohen) is trying to explain the fear she felt having to sleep alone in the woods with a husband she thought might kill her in the night, Jeff (Polaris Banks) jokes that he wouldn’t have waited until sundown. He would have waited until morning, apologized, placed all the blame at his feet, invited her on a mountain hike, and simply pushed her off a cliff. It makes sense … too much sense.

Why? Because that’s exactly where they’re going. Jeff has leveraged an overnight epiphany to get Keren out of her tent and onto a path that could conceivably be her demise. So, why is he surprised when she refuses to go near the edge? Because, after all his talk about realizing his actions have consequences beyond personal satisfaction, he still cannot grant her agency. And for a guy so desperate to be right, he hates that this is the one time she finally takes him at his word.

Beyond the psychological case study that ensues from Jeff’s flippant remark about Keren’s wellbeing and how it ignites what follows, the moment also proves to be a blueprint for what this entire film ultimately accomplishes. This thing is quite literally built (seriously or not) to serve as an alibi to a crime. Not murder, since Banks and Cohen are alive and well (they both attended the SXSW premiere). I’m talking about attempted murders. Plural. With intent.

I’m obviously joking, but it’s a testament to their handle on the medium and their ingenuity to weaponize its use in a court of law. Because And Her Body Was Never Found isn’t going meta solely by calling attention to the fourth wall with “Banks” and “Cohen” breaking character to reveal Jeff and Keren are fictional representations of them. It’s smashing through it to make us wonder if Banks and Cohen are breaking character to reveal “Banks” and “Cohen” are too.

The layers in play are so numerous that I might have feasibly been implicated in those crimes too. What if Banks emailing me to see if I wanted to review the film is another step on his and real-life wife Cohen’s plan to sweep what happened under the rug? It’s not enough to turn their arguments and vulnerable truths into cinema. Or to then turn the arguments resulting from that attempt at therapy into cinema too. They must also play the industry game.

After all, they’ve even injected a line about Green Cards and fraud should anyone believe what they saw on-screen is authentic. Just like you must prove to the court that a marriage is real by doing all the little things married couples must do over the span of many years, one would presume you should do the same to prove your “film” is real too. Debut it at a festival. Get a Rotten Tomatoes score. Secure a distributor. Send it out into the world.

Have I pushed the gimmick too far? Definitely. But that’s part of the fun. It’s further proof of how airtight their formal handling of the structure is visually and narratively. I tried poking holes. When things flip to vertical phone footage of them filming each other, I prepared for everything to fall apart as “found footage.” But it never does. Not even during an epilogue that adds one final layer courtesy of the only other person shown on-screen: Grae Drake as herself.

It’s also a fantastic example of DIY panache. Banks and Cohen did everything themselves prior to post-production—a crazy undertaking considering the set-ups necessary to make the first act of the film feel professionally produced with edits to coverage they probably had to map out well in advance to ensure the repetition to acquire it all wasn’t wasted. Things surely got easier after devolving to two people filming each other’s vitriol for posterity’s sake alone.

Their bickering recalled Kevin Smith’s Clerks insofar as its use of yelling to connote frustrated passion. That’s not an insult to the acting. The yelling here is crucial to the argument because Jeff and Keren inevitably argue about who is and isn’t yelling. And it all feels lived in because it was. I hope the toxicity on Banks’ part was embellished for both their sakes (Mor, run if not), but it works perfectly for these characters, their motives, and their shared trajectory.

It’s not easy to find ways to breathe fresh air into a microgenre like found footage, but they’ve done it by intentionally blurring every line that separates reality from fiction. Suspension of disbelief is easy when a premise hinges on the characters on-screen not being able to refute what occurred. Not only are Banks and Cohen here to do exactly that, but they also refute it inside the movie. It’s precisely those refutations that make the film work so well.

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Mor Cohen and Polaris Banks in AND HER BODY WAS NEVER FOUND.