My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog, 2009)

Grace Zabriskie, Michael Shannon, and Chloë Sevigny in My Son, My Son, What Ye Done

Cast: Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe, Chloë Sevigny, Michael Peña, Grace Zabriskie, Brad Dourif, Irma P. Hall, Loretta Devine. Screenplay: Herbert Golder, Werner Herzog. Cinematography: Peter Zeitlinger. Production design: Danny Caldwell. Film editing: Joe Bini, Omar Daher. Music: Ernst Reijseger. 

It took Werner Herzog a long time to get the backing for this odd duck of a film before the exactly right producer, David Lynch, took it on. It's a "true crime" story filtered through Greek myth and the Herzogian imagination with a touch of the Lynchian sensibility, so that it becomes a darkly comic mock tragedy, with Michael Shannon as Orestes and Grace Zabriskie as Electra. There are pet flamingos in the mix, with Brad Dourif in a cameo as a racist and homophobic ostrich farmer and a deadpan performance by Willem Dafoe as the detective trying to make sense of it all. Unfortunately, though fascinating in concept, it gets a little slow in delivery and might easily be dismissed as quirk for quirk's sake.