Ruth insults him. He listens, talks, lets her rage. I investigate crap. The battle of wills is lost when he kisses her. She knows she's won and torments him with her body.
Isolation exaggerates the intensity.
She isn't certain what she thinks, or feels anymore. She is in that transitional place between need and desire. He, on the other hand, knows exactly what he wants and it doesn't figure in any professional code of conduct manual. To say that Holy Smoke feels less of a whole than her previous work is not to dismiss it. In her first feature film, Sweetie, she created another awful family, only worse, with more satirical bite and a darker undertow.