Rating: C-
Dir: Spyder Dobrofsky
Star: Spyder Dobrofsky, Alexis Knapp, Christopher Livingston, David Steen
This isn’t so much a film you watch, as one you hold on to by your fingertips, while falling down its surreal rabbit-hole. It begins in a relatively straightforward manner, with an insane preacher (Steen) gassing his congregation with the help of a young boy. Twenty years later, Salem (Dobrofsky) has had his life fall apart after being framed as a sex offender by a mysterious person or group, going by the name ‘Fata Morgana’. His wife has left him, and his only social connection is escort Karisma (Knapp), who is having visions apparently related to the massacre. The cop on his case, Bandini (Livingston) is also struggling to retain his sanity, such as hallucinating a call from dispatch.
These all kinda tie together, with the help of supporting appearances from the likes of Bai Ling, playing Karisma’s madam, the same woman whose house Bandini raids. You also get Eric Roberts as a police psychiatrist, and Doug Jones as another one of Karisma’s clients (it may be the first time I’ve seen him playing a human being, rather than an alien or an amphibian). To about the half-way point, this was keeping its shape, held together as much by the strong sense of visual style. While I may not have been entirely sure of the narrative flow, it was still interesting to watch. The gas-mask motif which kept showing up, gave me hope the various narrative strands would mesh into a meaningful whole.
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t, at least for me. My tenuous grip on proceedings slipped away, and I was left flailing, all the way down the rest of the way. Although the visual stuff was still pretty, it became too Lynchian for me, abstruse and, if the truth be told, somewhat uninvolving. The seeds for this may have been sown in the earlier stages, because you aren’t given a lot of reason to care about Salem, or anybody else. There’s obvious past trauma, and a poor relationship with his mother, who shows up in a pack of nudie playing cards belonging to Karisma. That’s about it. This lack of engagement means, when things go off-road later on, there wasn’t enough motivation for me to keep up.
Consequently, my brain more or less went, “Sod this for a game of soldiers,” and gave up the struggle. I feel a certain sense of regret at this, since there were a number of interesting ideas present in the script. This has a generally acerbic view of organized religion, and does a fine job of depicting the way PTSD can take years, or even decades, to break the surface for a victim. But to be blunt, if I wanted to watch a David Lynch film… Well, please call in a wellness check on me should I express that desire, because I’ve clearly been replaced by an extraterrestrial pod-person. Probably played by Doug Jones.
The film is out now, on Amazon and other streaming services.