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One can only imagine what Christine Chubbuck would have made of the pitiful sideshow media reporting has become had she not gone ahead with her grimly ironic leap into modern infamy.  In 1974, in despair at her personal life and in disgust at the pragmatic sensationalist direction the local network for which she worked was taking, she shot herself in the head live on air.  This is not a spoiler, in the same way the Titanic sinking isn’t.

Antonio Campos’ rigidly uncomfortable film is concerned with the perfect storm of events that led to the twenty nine year-old’s death and emerges as a gripping, sympathetic take on the crushing effects of depression.  To do this, it has to first convince us of the very value of its existence.  In one of those occasional twists of movie providence where two very similar films emerge at the same time, Robert Greene’s meta-documentary Kate Plays Christine explored the very real risk of plunging into exploitation that comes with such an undertaking.  Are the filmmakers guilty of the very lurid sensationalism that Chubbuck railed against?

Luckily, Campos has Rebecca Hall in a stunning and nuanced performance that endeavours to glean every mote of understanding we can about her.  She never fails to keep the very real human Christine was front and centre.  Tall, but awkward and stooped, as if being perpetually weighed down by the paws of the black dog that consumed her, Christine is simultaneously independent and principled, and her own worst enemy.  She’s prone to childish outbursts at her mother, jealous of her mum’s new partner when she is burdened by her own virginity as she nears thirty.  She’s plagued by stomach pains that turn out to be an ovarian cyst.  Her love for a colleague (a reliably excellent Michael C. Hall) is crushingly unrequited.

All these personal issues are the extra pressures of a vividly realised evocation of a 70’s newsroom, with all the browns, oranges and institutionalised misogyny all present and correct.  Campos’ sense of time is far more assured than his sense of place, as although set in Florida, Christine’s story could occur anywhere in small-town America.

The only real potential problem is in how Campos depicts the inevitable.  It’s undeniably powerful but there may have been other stylistic choices he could have made that would have been just as affecting.  However, that’s only a minor quibble with a rigorous, measured film that successfully sidesteps any sense of the problematic.  Even if there was the sulphur stench of the exploitative, it would still be worth seeing for Rebecca Hall’s immaculate portrayal.