Barracuda(2016)

Barracuda
(Official SXSW Selection 2017)
(2017)

Sinaloa (Sophie Reid), a drifter and singer-songwriter, travels from the outskirts of London to Austin, Texas after reading the name of her half-sister, Merle (Allison Tolman) in her musician father’s obituary. Up until this point, Merle has lived a charmed and sheltered life under the thumb of her overbearing mother, Patricia (JoBeth Williams). Once Sinaloa arrives, however, everything begins to fall apart. Is Merle’s fiance Raul (Luis Bordonada) right to be welcoming to this stranger while she is suspicious?

At Merle’s engagement party, everything goes well until Sinaloa takes center stage by singing “Pretty Polly/Polly’s Love,” a ballad about a man who murders his bride-to-be and is then slain by her ghost. Merle, feeling overshadowed, later begins to warm to her half-sister. Still, doubts linger: Why has Sinaloa come, if not for a share of the family’s estate – or at least her father’s guitar with a decal of a barracuda on it?

Merle quits her high-pressure job due to the stress caused by this upheaval, and she and Raul fight. He leaves, but whether he’ll return is uncertain. 

Sinaloa confronts Patricia over why her late father chose Merle and Patricia’s family over her own mother, Rose. “Your mama was a piece of trash,” Patricia sneers. “When a man is done with trash, he throws it away.” Enraged, Sinaloa leaves, then comes back and strangles Patricia with the cord of the very same blender Pat had been using for a smoothie. She then wraps up the body and hides it in an underwater cave in a nearby river. 

Afterwards, she offers Merle a chance to come with her as she travels, but Merle turns her down.

The film ends with Sinaloa disappearing down a railroad culvert, camping out, and singing a song about two old-maid sisters who live alone, their father a handsome cattleman.