By Hannah Bonner

In James Schamus’s directorial debut Indignation, the mounting tension is so incremental one might startle themselves by gasping for air when the credits roll. Adapted from Philip Roth’s novel, it’s a film about the 1950s, propriety, dying for one’s country in the Korean War, religion, family, and falling in love, but it doesn’t fit neatly within the period or the romance genre. Rather, Schamus’s tightly crafted dialogue and meticulous set pieces simply enhance the superb acting of up-and-coming Logan Lerman (who plays central character Marcus) rather than render it kitsch. The film opens with Marcus attending an acquaintance’s funeral, a baseball teammate who died in the Korean War. When paying his respects to the grieving parents, he acknowledges he’s attending University in Ohio in the fall. “Ohio?” the now motherless woman responds. “How are you going to keep Kosher there?” Schamus (also the film’s writer) blessedly never permits the narrative to become too grim.

However, upon arriving at the Ohio campus, a campus beholden to tradition, moral uprightness, and Christian doctrine, Marcus hits the books, rarely socializing and studying with monk-like rigor. It’s not long before Olivia Hutton (played by Sarah Gadon, a David Cronenberg favorite of late) catches his eye and educates him in love, lust, and the maladies of the heart. She’s troubled, at times glacial, and emotionally fragile. Their first date changes both of their lives irrevocably, but, like so many things in life, they can’t foresee the consequences of their desire and their doubt. Marcus’s sexual awakening becomes inextricably linked with the college dean’s stipulations of how to lead a good life. And Marcus’s lack of religious faith further severs his connections to Dean Caudwell and the peers around him.

Yet, Olivia remains his object of desire, as poised and erect as the roses that she recurrently brings him during a stint in the hospital. It’s a delicate web of seemingly innocuous decisions that builds to the film’s culmination, swept along by Jay Wadley’s elegant soundtrack and close-ups of faces reminiscent of Peter Hujar’s most famous photograph, Orgi-astic Man One, the book cover to Hanya Yanagihara’s critically acclaimed A Little Life (2015). Indignation seizes you with its cinematic prowess and blooms in your memory long after viewing, blooming like a wound – a wound or a budding rose.