And Her Body Was Never Found had its world première at SXSW, 14 Mar 2026
“This movie was made by only two people,” reads the text that opens Polaris Banks’ ominously titled And Her Body Was Never Found. In fact the film begins with two bodies, and with sex. Yet what ought to be a shared, intimate moment between husband and wife Jeff (Banks) and Keren (Banks’ co-writer and actual wife Mor Cohen) plays out as the most unerotically dismal outdoors porn scenario ever seen, ends in neither mutual nor even individual satisfaction, and lays out tensions that are far more than merely sexual.
Jeff and Keren are on a hiking trip way off the beaten track, hoping to work together on their failing marriage – but instead all they can do is rehearse an inveterate bitterness that we suspect has built over years, and finds only momentary, masturbatory release in verbal oneupmanship. This couple squabbles, incessantly and at high volume. They are, as Jeff concedes, ‘argument addicts’ – and their arguments have reached that terminally self-referential, self-spiralling stage where there is no longer any real topic under discussion, but just the terms of discourse – like when online debaters no longer address the substance of their opponents’ position, but rather merely pick at the spelling and grammar of its expression. “This isn’t a conversation!” protests Keren, accurately, “This has been going in circles for too long, so I am done talking.” Such is the acrimony between them that even the ‘talking stick’ introduced to help them stop interrupting each other is quickly brandished as a weapon.
These endless arguments, echoing emptily in the remote forest land, feel lived-in and organic, not least because Banks and Cohen’s screenplay is drawn from real-life arguments that they have had – but artifice too imposes itself from the margins. Our knowledge from the outset that the couple acted and shot the film with only themselves as crew makes us hyperaware that every shift from his perspective to hers, and every one of the (many) cuts from a one shot to a two shot to a wide establishing shot, would have involved pausing the flow of the conversation, resetting the gear, and starting up again at the next line in the script. What seems like naturalism – in this most natural of environments – is in fact painstakingly crafted contrivance. And let’s not forget that, for all the painful plausibility of their words, this is not Banks and Cohen, but their fictive proxies Jeff and Keren, coming close to killing one another in their chronic rancour.
Still, as this relationship nears a cliff edge, both metaphorically and literally, viewers might start to get uneasy as to where the filmmaker/actors fit into all this friction, and what toll recreating it might be having on them as they are also, like their characters, alone together in this isolated wilderness, exposed both to the elements and to one another’s (heavily foregrounded) animosity. This blurring of lines between characters and creators, art and artist, becomes more explicit as the filmmaking process itself peeks out from the fiction, and vicious recriminations, aggressions and paranoia set in, leaving the viewer increasingly unsure whether they are watching a relationship drama (or two), or indeed found footage from an unfolding murder scene – and whether the video that they are seeing (increasingly shot from smartphones) is still part of the script, or potential evidence in a missing persons case.
This uncertainty on our part only adds to the tension, in what is a clever, funny, tense feature that captures fraught scenes from a marriage – and although it concerns a couple, or indeed couples, whose bickering and belligerence seem never to end, And Her Body Was Never Found itself, coming in at a briskly economic one hour and 15 minutes, never outstays its welcome.
strap: Polaris Banks’ reflexive ‘relationship horror’ keeps recreating scenes from a marriage on a cliff edge
© Anton Bitel
