To look is not to see. And so goes Claire in Motion, a missing persons dramatic procedural that struggles to be more than meets the eye. College math professor and wife to a known hobby survivalist, Claire (Breaking Bad’s Betsy Brandt) is forced into a waking nightmare when her husband Paul (Chris Beetem) fails to return home after a projected five-day stretch in the wilderness. As the days crawl on with few clues and diminishing search party efforts, the only thing that’s becomes certain is the all-consuming specter of uncertainty itself.

Directors Lisa Robinson and Annie Howell fiddle with the idea of  context in their telling of Claire’s disquieting ordeal, and just as anyone revisiting old photo albums in the aftermath of a breakup or other significant life-altering event, she’s forced to contend with the fact that their on-paper blissful marriage may have been but a domestic mirage.

Pouring over the library of home videos stored on her iPhone, Claire uncovers the sedentary clues of crumbling kinship: the annoyed glances, thinned patience, neglected bonds. General disconnect. This wrinkle is complicated by the arrival of  Allison (Anna Margaret Hollyman) a youthful  grad student who worked secretly with Claire’s husband prior to his disappearance.

General psychology describes the phenomenon by which people tend to  credit events to fit their own hypotheses as confirmation bias. With the prolonged disappearance of Paul and the sudden arrival of Allison, the haunting presumption of infidelity looms over Claire like a rain cloud. Suddenly, his likely demise becomes more palatable.

As Claire, Brandt offers strong work. Tasked with seesawing between sweeping grief and ambivalent  apathy, Claire in Motion lends Brandt the stage to showcase capable character work. As her sorrow turns to suspicion, Brand harnesses the nuances of Howell and Robinson’s script.

The foil to Claire’s internal battle with the kaleidoscopic brace of her husband’s shadow is shown in a relationship with their son (Conor Zev Haworth), a complexly written child who has much more gracefully adopted to the idea that he might never know the truth as to his father’s whereabouts.

On one hand, Claire in Motion presents an interesting inversion of the missing persons thriller by turning it into a character study but in doing so  Robinson and Howell have largely drained  the excitement and anticipation that typically accompanies such territory. Their tackling of the acidic tricks that doubt can play on the mind is effective in moments there was never able to take on  the intoxicating quality one might expect.

CONCLUSION: Lisa Robinson and Annie Howell’s ‘Claire in Motion’ gives Betsy Brandt her much deserved spotlight and though parts of it make for tightly wound psychological study, is never quite able to overcome its low-broiling internal monologue on grief.

C

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