A note on the Safdie Brothers and why Uncut Gems is one of the most formally precise films about anxiety ever made.

Uncut Gems is three Schrader films layered on top of each other, all playing simultaneously and at maximum volume. The sound design alone is enough to talk about for an hour — the way the score by ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER undercuts and overlaps every scene, creating a sensation of perpetual imminence that the narrative's constant near-misses reinforce.

But the film is formally precise in a way that distinguishes it from similarly stressful films. Every escalation is calibrated. Howard Ratner doesn't just make bad decisions — he makes decisions that are logical given his psychology and catastrophic given the world he's moving in. The audience is always slightly ahead of Howard and slightly behind the film.

Adam Sandler's performance deserves its own discussion. What he does in this film requires the ability to be sympathetic while being completely wrong about everything, and to sustain that dual register for two hours without collapsing into either sympathy or condemnation. It's one of the great American performances of the past decade and it wasn't even nominated.