Never Look Away (2024) ‘Sundance’ Movie Review

Never Look Away (2024) ‘Sundance’ Movie Review: What is it like to take on and defy any curveballs hurled by life? Noted Australian actress Lucy Lawless’s feature directorial debut takes a long and hard look at that question as she pays an emotionally stirring tribute to the trailblazing Margaret Moth. A New Zealand-born CNN cameraperson, Moss defined herself by her indomitable quest of stories, wilfully courting extreme danger, paying its price but unafraid to start again and re-plunge into it all.

“Never Look Away” is an impassioned ode to one woman’s unstoppable, hard grit, who doesn’t give the slightest chance to the worst of circumstances from cutting her down. Greatly aided by her editors, Whetham Allpress and Tim Woodhouse, Lawless traverses a decade of Moth’s audacious work at CNN, beginning with her time chronicling Kuwait’s Desert Storm in 1990. This was when she also had a passionate affair with a sound recordist, Yaschinka. His accounts of her provide us with the most intimate window into the mystery behind the steely, unbreakable persona. Slowly, a picture emerges of how Margaret constructed a sort of new character for herself, taking refuge in the fabricated surname of ‘Moth’ and keeping repressed a childhood spent in fear of her parents’ violence. Whenever nudged, she shuffled past any peek into her past, her family.

Therefore, Moth fiercely chafed at traditional structures of family, even sterilizing herself to prevent any possibility of having kids. This is a woman who didn’t flinch; instead showed constant eagerness to put herself in the line of fire if it afforded her access to urgent narratives and images that she held necessary to go out into the world. It was what fuelled her life. Frequently, in the course of the documentary, Moth’s acquaintances wonder what actually drove Moth, reflecting on what so persistently turbo-charged her unflagging spirit. More than one person mentions some deep anger that might have propelled her.

A colleague from another organization strikingly recounts how Moth used to sleep with her boots on, ever raring to head out for the next assignment before storming into her next riskiest vantage point of shooting. Jeff Russi, one of her many lovers but who stuck with her, describes her as the lion-tamer in a circus. “She was the alien”, he adds. Enigma strongly tinges several of Moth’s associates and acquaintances as they detail her ferocity and fortitude. There’s awe in their voices when they highlight her physical endurance, often skipping meals for days yet perceptibly remaining utterly unaffected.

Margaret Moth appears in Never Look Away by Lucy Lawless, an official selection of the World Documentary Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Moth’s charisma drew people into her heady spell. The assemblage of archival photographs and video footage that are dutiful, if a tad bit unadventurous, interspersed with the extensive narration, make us encounter a woman with singular, head-turning beauty. Her gaze shot right through. It contained the piercing charge of a woman who dared to venture into choppy waters throughout the course of her life. Moth is presented as someone who is aware of the alluring effect she has on others, letting that persuade her that she can freely dictate all relationships with anyone who seeks to step inside her ambit.

Russi talks lovingly of their times together, with her opening up the world to him as she took him skydiving, skating, and punk-clubbing. He keeps restating her exotic appeal. Her life commandment? “Don’t be boring”, he remarks. Moth was continually resistant to falling back into settled patterns of life and routine. She exulted in the wild unpredictability of the tensest situations. “War became the ultimate drug,” her ex asserts. This is something Lawless puts a special emphasis on, trying to grapple with the implications of Moth’s relationship to the war zone, the area which seemed to give her purpose and ironically an unparalleled sense of control.

Stefano, who worked at the CNN along with Moth, explains there’s an undeniable adrenaline rush the particular circumstance offers, with a simultaneous “surge and an upset”. With Moth, however, the upset bit just didn’t register. She stayed perpetually on the lookout to chase the hurricane. Not only did she actively pursue it, but she also inserted herself in its middle.

It also inevitably came at great personal cost. But she remained one who didn’t let anything deter her. It is this critical chapter, where Moth rises again after being nearly fatally sniped and rebuilds her life, thrusting back into action on the field, that the director scores the film’s inspiring, heart-wrenching highs. There are troubling hints here that suggest how far Moth could drift off to the limits she didn’t remotely care for while she scouted for ways in which she could cull out the most scathingly direct records of the horrors she came up close against.

As Moth herself talks at one point about how vital it was to her to accumulate a richness of experience above anything else in life, I couldn’t help but be taken aback at several moments by the untrammeled intensity with which she achieved those. Remarkably, “Never Look Away” acknowledges this discomfort but also wisely never insinuates that an ounce of it can be used to discredit Moth’s seething search for truth.

At a later moment in the film, one of the CNN guys distinguishes the toughness Moth projected, carefully stating “tough wasn’t how she acted”. “Never Look Away” places a lot of attention on Moth’s brittle exterior. There are only sparing flashes of her streaks of anxiety and panic. The images of kids she captured in volatile areas brim with tenderness and love though we are told how she was extremely touchy in the presence of her friends’ kids. It is a fascinating juxtaposition and I wish Lawless provoked more thought into this.