4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Our Last Resort' Review: Bound by the Past
Frida Nilsen often refers to Gabriel Miller as 'my brother,' but the pair are not siblings as the term is generally understood. Actually, they're closer than most flesh and blood relations could ever be, and readers of 'Our Last Resort,' Clémence Michallon's terrific thriller, will gradually understand why.
Theirs is a bond forged in the crucible of a childhood and adolescence spent in a cult in upstate New York. Its young members weren't permitted to know which adults in their orbit were their biological parents (if, indeed, their biological parents were around), weren't allowed to leave the commune grounds, weren't given healthcare or medical care, and suffered myriad predations at the hands of the group's charismatic leader.
Through it all, and then through the years after the two, at 18, engineered their escape, Frida, the novel's narrator, and Gabriel kept each other's secrets and had each other's backs. 'I stay seated by his bed,' Frida notes during a late-night vigil more than a decade postcommune. 'I sit, eyes open. Listening. Standing guard. It's nothing I haven't done before.'
Chapters alternate between the present—an account of Frida and Gabriel's stay at a luxurious hotel in the Utah desert, a reunion after an almost nine-year schism—and the past—a chronicle of life in the cult and the subsequent struggle to adjust to the outside world.
