The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Loneliness with Fangs

What I keep coming back to in The Twilight Saga: New Moon is not the love triangle everybody remembers, but the sound of absence. Chris Weitz makes a very odd mainstream blockbuster out of being left behind: doors open on empty rooms, voices arrive from nowhere, months pass in a blur, and Bella Swan seems to be living inside a weather system that has forgotten how to change. That’s the real special effect here.

Not the werewolves, not the Volturi, not even the famous shirtless transformation scene (though, yes, that’s there too). It’s the way the movie turns abandonment into atmosphere.

Weitz came to this material with a résumé that made a certain amount of sense and a great deal of uncertainty. He’d made About a Boy and The Golden Compass — films interested, in different ways, in protected interiors and damaged young people — and then stepped into a franchise that had already become a kind of public weather event. New Moon is the second Twilight film, and like most second chapters, it has to do the awkward work of widening a world that was initially built around one obsessive mood.

What surprised me on revisiting it is how little Weitz seems interested in simply accelerating things. He keeps slowing the film down, as if to ask what happens when the fantasy of being chosen curdles into the experience of being disposable.

That choice — to linger on emptiness rather than plot mechanics — is what makes the movie more interesting than its reputation suggests. The first third is practically anti-cinema in the commercial sense: Bella stares out windows, pages turn in a calendar montage, seasons slip by with a kind of merciless politeness. Catherine Hardwicke’s first Twilight had a scrappy, adolescent tactile-ness; Weitz’s version is smoother, colder, and more schematic.

But that coolness has meaning. Forks is no longer a place where romance feels fated; it’s a place where grief can echo. The blue-gray palette doesn’t merely say “sad.” It makes sadness feel industrial, routine, almost bureaucratic.

I’m not sure the movie always knows how funny it is — or, maybe, how absurdly serious its own emotions are. There’s a hard straight face to scenes that would collapse in less committed hands. Bella’s hallucinations of Edward, for instance, are staged with such solemnity that they tip over into a strange, almost religious camp.

He appears like a private apparition of shame and desire, always framed at a remove, as though the film understands that heartbreak is partly the mind’s decision to torment itself in high definition. Those moments are discussed a lot for obvious fan reasons, but what I find more telling is how Weitz edits them: not as shocks, but as interruptions. Memory here doesn’t comfort; it ambushes.