If only Theresa (Kirsten Dunst) did a little more research, maybe she wouldn’t count on cannabis tincture to save her mother’s life. The first trailer for Woodshock, the psychedelic drama and feature debut of fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy (their label, Rodarte, created the ballet costumes in Black Swan), seems to be about a daughter treating her mother’s cancer with cannabis tincture and indulging a bit herself, leading Theresa through a hallucinatory and arboreal trip through her own grief and isolation.
The press release accompanying the new trailer describes the film as a “dream-world all its own,” with Dunst playing “a haunted young woman spiraling in the wake of profound loss, torn between her fractured emotional state and the reality-altering effects of a potent cannabinoid drug.”
The trailer gives every indication that Woodshock delivers. It’s bubbling over with double exposures, macro shots of creepy fluids and the haunting sensations of the primal forest, soaked in darkness. Will the woods be a place of redemption for Theresa, or, as Antichrist would have it, does she discover that “nature is Satan’s church”?
Though Woodshock is clearly more about the psychedelic experience than snake oil, watching the trailer can’t help but evoke the whole online ecosystem’s harmful cannabis tincture hype.
Many miraculous claims have been made for cannabis oil, most commonly that it cures cancer. It doesn’t. Though early experimental data suggests cannabinoids (even synthetic ones) and purified THC may prove useful in cancer treatment, by discouraging the spread of cancer cells and decelerating tumor growth, cannabis-derived drugs are more likely to become a supplement to chemotherapy, rather than a replacement.
Cancer Research UK does a good job of contextualizing cannabis research outside the hype-y, alt-medicine quackery dominating search engine results for cannabis oils and cannabis tinctures. People die listening to these assholes, rejecting conventional cancer treatment until it’s too late, like Steve Jobs and his juice fixation.
Marijuana is quickly becoming big business, so it’s high time people start treating it that way. Businesses behave amorally; there’s no reason not to apply the same skepticism to medical marijuana claims as is applied to Big Pharma. Don’t let a multi-billion dollar industry get away with lies that would shame Sean Spicer (okay, probably not), even if they are getting you high.
In conclusion: don't treat your Mom's cancer with cannabis oil, unless you're going to drink it yourself and start floating about the woods and having a real good ol' time being sad and weird and alienated from yourself and others.
Hectoring aside, a new attempt at a modernized psychedelic aesthetic is always welcome. The past few years have given us low-profile successes like Queen of Earth and high-profile silliness like The Neon Demon. Woodshock looks awesome. Hopefully it will be more than delightful production design. There’s a distinct lack of mysticism in our lives; we need every trip away from reality we can get.
Oh yeah, there's a poster too:
Woodshock hits theaters Sept. 15.
