Breakfall

Slor’s underwhelming sophomore effort (after 2021’s At the End of the World, Turn Left) mixes repetitive sex scenes with slivers of plot. Jujitsu enthusiast Mina Banksy, a 32-year-old divorced mother of a two-year-old who has “become a monster,” finds erotic pleasure in receiving choke holds from her muscular, sweating sparring partners at the gym. This propensity for rough play and a heady whiff of testosterone has led to an affair with Matthew, a cop and fellow gym mate, and to her divorce from her husband, Dima. It subsequently leads to sex with Dylan, “a nice guy for a former drug-dealing thief,” and that association brings the police knocking at the door of her Chicago home. After the police depart, she calls Matthew for advice, and they rekindle their relationship. Eventually, she stumbles by chance on Dylan’s body by a dumpster in the alley of the halfway house where he lived. Then Dima disappears. There’s no detective work, and things just happen when Mina pauses from her musings about her sex life. This works better as erotica than a whodunit. (Apr.)