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Sundance Review: BLUE RUIN

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“Blue Ruin”
Directed by  Jeremy Saulnier
Starring Macon Blair, Amy Hargreaves, Kevin Kolack, David W. Thompson, Brent Werner, Sidne Anderson
Thriller
92 Mins
R
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Enveloped in a scent of Coen Bros, Blue Ruin is a masterclass in indie reinvention – reinvention of genre, of character, even of plot subversion. But no matter how familiar the elements we know to comprise revenge flicks, we never exactly know where Blue Ruin is going to turn next. It’s a quiet tirade of doomed duty with explosive showdowns and tactful character arcs that adds up to a hell of a good movie.

Relatively unknown actor Macon Blair heads up the show as Dwight, a vagrant, homeless type with a penchant for breaking into people’s houses to get his bathe on. Living out of a bullet-ridden car, overlooking the ocean and grown over with sandy seagrass, we can immediately reconcile the sad existence of this bearded transient with life gone awry. So when a policewoman (Sidne Anderson) shows up and asks him to come down to the station and reveals that his parent’s killer is getting out of prison early on parole, his recluse desperation clicks with us as fresh-born necessity clicks on for him.

What soon unfolds is an accelerated game of cat and mouse that almost seems to wrap itself up too soon but that’s only when it gets interesting. Following Dwight’s act of self-retribution, we’re lost, oblivious to where things will turn next. Rightfully so, the pathway that twists and turns to the final scene is as unpredictable as it is plainly awesome.Part of the fun of the whole adventure is not knowing that will transpire so I would urge you to learn as little about the film as possible. 

Jeremy Saulnier, who wrote and directed the film, has transmuted the greatness of iconically American revenge narratives into something entirely his own. He’s drained his film of the eye-rolling easy outs we’ve seen from so many Hollywood narratives, strained it of incredulity and served it cold and somber, the best, and only way, to do revenge right. His refreshing take on a genre that’s been kicked around in the mud since the birth of storytelling is at once startling and radiant with part of the credit needing to find it’s way to star Macon Blair.

Behind his scraggly beard and muted eyes, Blair is modestly restrained and seeing his transformation, both physically and emotionally, is one of the great joys of this gritty saga. Though he’s had his hands in some other small projects, Blair is a talent who’s never gotten his name out there and I’m willing to bet that after a performance of this magnitude, that’ll be quick changing. His haunted numbness and jumpy brooding bring such well-tempered yet acrimonious life to the character. For a man on a mission, Dwight is about as three dimensional as they get, a godsend born of Saulnier’s able script and Blair’s even-keeled execution.

With foreboding cinematography and an anxious score, both also from Saulnier, that help fill in the blanks of this mysterious back country and the people who inhabit it, everything feels very much real world. But here, things are cloaked in mystery, blanketed in doubt and raging with subtext.

Unexpectedly wonderful, Blue Ruin is the reason why America needs independent cinema. It’s the tap on the shoulder the increasingly derivative Hollywood needs, a gentle, almost soft-spoken, reminder that iconic storytelling traditions are born on foundations of greatness for good reason. Revenge narratives are a dime a dozen but when storytellers are able to really get to the root of why these archetypal tales are so compelling, as Saulnier is able to do here, they strike a collective nerve, making us cheer at their ability to both homage and be wholly original at the same time.

A-

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Sundance Review: DINOSAUR 13

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“Dinosaur 13”
Directed by Todd Douglas Miller
Documentary
U.S.A.
105 Mins

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The first documentary I saw at Sundance has weighed heavily on my mind. At once about dinosaurs, humans and the failings of the justice system, Dinosaur 13 has singled out a mind-boggling small town event that slipped under the national radar. While the story itself is every bit worthy of our attention and empathy, in telling this infinitely gasp-inducing story, Todd Douglas Miller digs up a bevy of first time-level fumbles that robs some of its meteoric impact.

Named after the historical relic that the characters find themselves helplessly orbiting around, Dinosaur 13 takes aim at the discovery of the the 13th T-Rex fossil: the largest, most intact T-Rex fossil find at the time. Intriguing though that may be, the highligh is the calamitous aftermath that no one could foresee. Slapped with a cool, callused numerical label, the film’s title foreshadows the detached “bag it and tag it” ethos of the film’s “enemy,” a shadowy hand juxtaposed against the deep-set emotional turmoil of the little guys fighting to preserve this colossal fossil and their reputations. Collection of bones though they may be, this T-Rex skeleton becomes so much more to this group of fledging South Dakota scientists who have lovingly named it “Sue.”

Peter Larson and his younger brother began collecting fossils as children and have since opened the South Dakota’s Black Hills Institute of Geological Research where they prepare fossils for museums, private buyers, and, most of all, for their own love of the craft. Wandering in a sandstorm, one of their volunteers, Susan Hendrickson (for whom Sue is named), discovers the distinctive arc of a dino vertebrate emerging from the graystone of a cliffside. When the Larsons arrive to access the situation, they find that they have come across what is arguably “the greatest paleontological find in history.”

It all seems well and good for the few years to follow as the Larson’s buy the fossil from (almost sketchy) landowner Maurice Williams and proceed to undergo the timely process of preparing the fossil for its eventual reveal. It’ll be the treasure of their musuem to be, a savior for the struggling town and a hot ticket destination-maker for non-tourist friendly South Dakota.  Nearly two years pass in which Larson and company tediously sculpt and scrape millennium of build up from the preserved bones when, out of thin air, the National Guard show up with a small army of thirty-plus men, armed to the teeth, and demand the seizure of the Sue.

In the most WTF twist of the year, it takes the rest of the film to really unfold exactly what went down with the Larsons and their Sue but it all revolves around the tricky wording of land ownership laws and ends up as more or less an inditement of the US government sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong. A circus of a trial plays out, players are sent to the same prisons that held the likes of Timothy McVeigh and John Gotti, and the most persistent note to follow is one of sorrowful disappointment. “I thought this was America” has never rang so true.
 
With it’s solid tenor of us vs. them and a crystalline case of the judicial system failing on the most basic of levels, Dinosaur 13 is a beast. But trying to wring all he can from the emotional recounting of events, Miller takes too many detours and let’s the paltry production budget shine through more than he ought. Matt Morton‘s repetitive guitar-plucked score sounds recorded in a matter of minutes while the unnecessary wealth of recreation play with the limp zeal of a daytime news special. With a topic this strong and subjects welling with emotion, it’s really a head-scratcher why Miller takes these missteps. With a good 20 minutes or so shaved off, this is a great documentary. As is, it’s still worth the trip down the rabbit hole.

C+

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Sundance Review: FISHING WITHOUT NETS

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“Fishing Without Nets”
Directed by Cutter Hodierne
Starring Abdikani Muktar, Abdi Siad, Abduwhali Faarah, Abdikhadir Hassan, Reda Kateb, Idil Ibrahim
U.S.A./Somalia/Kenya
109 Mins

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No name cast recreates Somali pirates premise, the left-field zeitgeist du jour, exploring themes of hubris and self-preservation in its slack-lined narrative that sporadically delivers emotional welts. With a hook of a first act and a gut-wrenching conclusion, the middle bits of Fishing Without Nets are left a little undercooked but by the time we get to the tail end of it, we’ve all but forgotten any moments of ennui. We’re too busy collectively picking our jaws up off the floor.

Expanded from the 2012 short film of the same name which won him the Sundance Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking, director Cutter Hodierne returns to the high seas of pirating. Abdi, who through years of working as a fisherman is a veteran navigator of international shipping channels, is hard won into the gun-totting pirating industry. But what can you expect of a young family man whose aquatic resources have seemingly swum towards better waters? With the influx of more and more tankers disrupting a once lively ecosystem, the supply and demand chain has been forever shifted, perhaps forever tainted, and the salt of desperation has the power to force even the most ethical of hands.

There’s something a bit fishy about the fact that the writer/director, Cutter Hodierne, of this Somalian-perspective drama is a white American. Attempts to adopt another culture’s perspective can read ham-fisted but when you take Hodierne’s dramatic background into consideration, it’s no wonder the man is sea-obsessed. Before his birth, his parents left behind their lives, jobs, and families and took to a 32-foot sailboat, for which he was named, subsequently raising him aboard the craft for the first three years of his life. Accordingly, salt water must run deep in his veins.

It’s no wonder then that the most chilling sequences of Fishing Without Nets comes from the harrowing uncertainty of ocean living. Plowed in by waves and surrounded by endlessness, there is visceral fear in the assumed serenity of the sea. Seeing that fear translate to desperation and then added to the high stakes of pirating makes for some incredibly compelling and emotional viewing.

Filmed entirely in Somali, we can only imagine the behind-the-scenes language barriers Hodierne and his cast had to fight through. According to Hodierne, the heavy physicality and frequent improvisation made for light-footed scene work, “I relied on the translator and the actors for ideas and culturally relevant conversations and scenes so working with them was a collaborative process. They brought cultural and linguistic elements to the film that I could not.” Though this set the stage for some scenes that stretched on past their dramatic limitations, the glowering scowls beading from Abdi Siad‘s Blackie is enough to keep us on the edge of our seats and drive the tension to skyward heights.

B-

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Sundance Review: LIFE AFTER BETH

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“Life After Beth”
Directed by Jeff Baena
Starring Aubrey Plaza, Dane DeHaan, John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon, Cheryl Hines, Paul Reiser
U.S.A.
91 Mins

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The scales may tip all over the place on this zom-rom-com but even with all its tonal inconsistency, we’re dumped in a place of smirky satisfaction and forgiving admiration of intent. Life After Beth is narrowly shoddy, but still an easy crowd-pleaser and an affable experiment in reckless absurdity.

As Tomboy one famously said, Dane DeHaan could sell a ketchup Popsicle to a woman in white gloves, so even though his chemistry will Aubrey Plaza might be hard sold, it’s impossible not to believe the earnestness evidently pouring from his drippy soul. Plaza, that beloved goon, is no certifiable dramaturge and rides her quirky shtick hard here but, for what it’s worth, seeing her strapped to an oven, face peeling away with rot and sauntering towards brains is worth the price of admission alone.
 
Beth (Plaza), for whom the movie is cleverly named, met her end at the tip of a raddler’s fang solo hiking at night. The film opens on her funeral which sets the stage for a rather dour half hour with DeHaan almost over-committing to the conceit that his star-crossed lover has met her end. His performance oozes grief, demanding the likes of the Beth’s parents, John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon, who help keep things frothy as the film boils towards full-blown satire.

Without announcement, Beth reappears as if nothing had happened and overwhelmed with the miracle that is her revival, all are willing to overlook how this Beth isn’t quite the same as the one they put in the ground a week prior. Like the changing tides of puberty, Beth begins to undergo a new transformation, budding into a full blown zombie.

Leaps and bounds away from the breed of zombies George Romeo has familiarized us with, these Z’s suffer a case of super strength and amnesia but lack the malevolent, herdish brain-gobbling qualities. At least, at first. It’s during these introductory “zombie” moments when director Jeff Baena experiments with his own, unique faction of the obnoxiously popular iconography that the movie proudly rears its creative head and is at the top of its game for it. With zombies’ unnatural penchant for smooth jazz and love of reassurance-laden chatting, Life After Beth proves fitfully riotous. But when chaos breaks out and everything goes to piece, that flair of individuality and precision of vision falls apart as well.

More of a fun experiment than a certified success, this zillionth installment in the zombie niche has its share of dicey moments but it’s also riddled with guffawable zingers and crafty physical comedy. Plaza goes for broke and will surely be remembered for one of the strangest performances this year while DeHaan is rarely off the mark and it’s their unlikely chemistry that rounds Life After Beth round the bases, even if it occasionally limps its way across home plate.

C+

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Sundance Review: CALVARY

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“Calvary”
Directed by John Michael McDonagh
Starring Brendan Gleeson, Chris O’Dowd, Kelly Reilly, Aidan Gillen, Dylan Moran, Marie-Josée Croze
Ireland/United Kingdom
100 Mins

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A preist struggling with his faith and desperate for purpose in the murk of fog-blanketed, 21st century Ireland receives a death threat from an abused alter boy from his past. He has one week and then will be gunned down at the beach, he is told, so he’s got just enough time to get his affairs in order. Although Brendan Gleeson‘s Father James Lavelle may have never touched a fly, much less an alter boy, that’s exactly why this abusee wants to strike out at him, “I want to hurt someone good. Someone who has never hurt anyone.” With exact knowledge of who this man is, Father James chooses not to turn him in, instead he’ll try to change the man. While this selfless choice might inevitably lead to his demise, it’s the only righteous path that his Catholic worldview and personal pathos allow for.

Decidedly more serious and bleak than his debut effort, the well-received The Guard, John Michael McDonagh treads in a whole new direction, though remaining in the lavish playground of his native Ireland. While The Guard allowed Gleeson a chance to flex his comedic muscles playing a racist, half-witted police officer with a semi-solid set of morals, Calvary gives him ample room to breathe as a dramatist.

Knowing he only has seven days to live, we see Father James amble through the five stages of grief and Gleeson is rapturous through it all. At first, he goes about his daily life as if nothing has changed, humming from the threat but keeping it wrangled to the back of his mind. Soon, he’ll begin to strike out at those close to him, embodying the anger of a man watching his life tick away. Onto bargaining – he cuts deals with local elite alongside God – depression – his ancient history with the bottle begins to resurface – and finally the cool serenity of acceptance.

Offering Gleeson a chance to shift masks like a Jungian headcase, Calvary is a showcase of acting prowess but also has a rich beating heart in the rich texture of landscape and the girth of questionable characters that surround Father James’ final days. He may know the identity of his to-be killer but that’s never a fact we’re privy to. As we’re watching, each character, big and small, seems to carry an ulterior motive and McDonagh cranks the suspicion so high that we wouldn’t blink if the perp was Father’s James own daughter (Kelly Reilly).

Though sundry moments of muted comic relief courtesy of the increasingly reliable Chris O’Dowd seek to remind us that even in tragedy, life carries on, Calvary is an intrepid and deeply somber drama, soaring from Gleeson’s dynamic performance. With the capacity to leave us hanging our heads  in despair, McDonagh looks past the low hanging fruit and aims for something infinitely more powerful and soulfully infectious, a modern stance on what it truly means to sacrifice.

B+

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Sundance Review: BOYHOOD

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“Boyhood”
Directed by Richard Linklater
Starring Ellar Salmon, Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette, Lorelei Linklater
163 Mins 

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A monolith of cinema, Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood is a soaring accomplishment of product and process. Famously filmed over the course 12 years, Linklater’s long form approach allows for an intimacy and connection like no film before. From the time we meet young Macon at the tender age of six until he moves to college, Linklater fosters his audience’s near parental ties to this young man, making us feel for a character in unprecedented manner. It’s a masterpiece in all senses of the word; a rare trailblazer of a film with macroscopic vision that’s as uniformly jaw-dropping as the final product.

The cat has been in the bag for the bulk of filming on Boyhood but when Linklater and frequent collaborator Ethan Hawke announced last year that their yet untitled 12 Year Project would likely see the light of day in 2014, I wasn’t the only one to rush it to the top of my most anticipated films of 2014 list. While most movies film over the course of a few months, Linklater showed unprecedented patience with a willingness to craft this story over the course of a dozen years. Although the end product probably shared a similar amount of shoot time, breaking it up over that extensive period of time is wholly original (even in regard to Paul Almond‘s celebrated Up series which only checked in once every seven years.) Going into the project, Linklater had a general arc in mind but would let the times reflect unforeseeable changes, moving the direction of the film in line with the sway of culture and ethos. In that regard, the film serves as a time capsule for an ever changing American zeitgesit over the past decade.

Not above chats of Star Wars and girls, The Beatles and drinking, and the once celebratory naivety of Obama’s campaign of hope, Boyhood feels like a film Linklater designed particularly with me in mind. I wonder how many other people will feel the same way; how many will experience such a visceral gut punch and how many will find younger versions of themselves in a morphing Mason. Feeling such a instinctive connection urges questions on the universality of the human experience, it compels us wrestle with the past and acutely acknowledge the shifting paradigm that is the individual. Scientists, and stoners, say that because of our cellular lifespan, a human body is completely replaced within the span of 7 years. Looking at snapshots in time like this, we could be easily convinced this process is even more rapid. From one year to another, there’s a base consistency of character in Macon but its overshadowed by the omnipresent winds of change perennially blowing him into new directions.

Calling it a coming-of-age story feels slight as Boyhood tracks the joy and pain of growing up, one delicate moment at a time. We find ourselves in Macon, a perceptive youth, in his strength and in his weakness, in his whiny teenage angst and his youthful abandon, in his quasi-stoned prolific moments of reflection and his meekest helplessness. When he’s too young to stand up for himself, I felt the pangs of my 8-year old vulnerable self, reeling from my parent’s separation. As his hair grows long and he starts dipping into the pleasure pool, his raw arrogance is a relic I can robustly relate to.

I found myself beaming with pride at moments, disappointed in him at others and silently heartbroken and yet joyful as he reached new milestones. I watched him grow up, I witnessed him learning valuable life lessons, I feel in love beside him. To young Ellar Salmon‘s credit, there’s never a moment where we don’t fully believe the deeply personal yet universal John Doe plight of a boy coming of age. He’s an every man and an intellectual and Salmon’s maturing performance helps to auction the many faces one man can put on. When you stop to consider that Linklater had to take a half-blind shot in the dark with Salmon, casting him well before he could prove himself as a consistent and talented actor willing to put in a dozen years of his life into one performance, the fact that Salmon turned out as good as he was is nothing short of a miracle, much like the film itself.

A+

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Sundance Review: WISH I WAS HERE

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“Wish I Was Here”
Directed by Zach Braff
Starring Zach Braff, Kate Hudson, Mandy Patinkin, Josh Gad, Ashley Greene, Joey King, Pierce Gagnon
114 Mins

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Great music can’t bandaid uber depressing bummertown that sees Mandy Patkinson slowly dying, a breadwinning wife privy to gross sexual harassment at work, and an out-of-work/failed actor in director/writer/star Zach Braff. With virtually ever b-plot revolving around a different cause for concern, Wish I Was Here is occasionally profound but always deathly dour.

Even Braff’s movie children are saturated with their own “quirky” issues. Daughter Grace (Joey King) is borderline addicted to her Jewish faith, a strange and slightly off-putting trait to see in a young girl circa 2014, while son Tucker (Pierce Gagnon) rocks a bit of an apathy problem – a generational malaise that reveals Braff’s sweeping pessimism for future generations. Tucker naps in class, monkeying around under the hot breath of Jewish academia, and generally seems disinterested in all. But he’s 10 or something so I guess we’re supposed to cut him, and by extension Braff, a break when his arc never goes anywhere.

For how much of a milk farm Wish I Was Here turns into, the film starts on promising ground with a great opening bit that’s unorthodox, meta, and entirely intriguing. We’re immediately invested and he smartly slips into some snarky comedy that gets the laughs rolling fast and loose. Without provocation, the film sputters and nosedives when it drops the c-bomb on us. Cancer. Another fucking movie about cancer.

And though many will say that calling this a movie about cancer is reductive – that it’s a movie about confronting your fears, particularly the fear of losing the ones you love or the fear of giving up on your dreams – everything in this movie is a cancer. Aidan’s faltering career is a cancer. Sarah’s cubicle co-inhibitor is a cancer. The cancer eating away at Saul (and yes, Patkinson is named Saul) is a cancer. So even if you don’t consider this a “cancer movie,” cancer is the only catalytic backbone driving the film forward.

The chief issue is, when you already have cancer rolling around bringing everything down, there’s just no need for all this other glumness. If the center of the film is dark and dreary, you need to lighten things up around the edges. Even the moments of levity are stained with Braff’s strangely caustic musings – Scrubs alum Donal Faison is slipped in for a quick scene where Aidan passes his daughter off as dying of cancer so he can test drive a cool car. My jaw dropped. More cancer? How original. There’s nothing funny here. It’s just down for the sake of being down.

Braff wrote the script over the course of a year, collaborating with brother Adam Braff. Once they wrapped up the script, there was little to no interest from the studios. So to finance this passion project of theirs, Braff and Braff notoroiously went to Kickstarter where they would raise 3.1 million dollars, a million over their goal. And while this Kickstarter phenomenon will surely go down in history as further changing the antiquated ways of studio control and proving the efficacy of crowd sourcing, that’s likely all that Wish I Was Here will be remembered for.

Ultimately mawkish and bittersweet, Wish You Were Here is second-rate meditation on phoenix cycle that’s virtually guaranteed to drag you by the heels into a depressive state.

C-

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Sundance Review: WETLANDS

by Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Raunchy German picture Wetlands is graphic, poignant teen sexploration to squirm and cackle through. Helen is a young nympho with a passion for bodily fluids of all sorts and a serious case of hemorrhoids. When a shaving incident lands her in the hospital, she tries to pull a parent trap and get her divorced, and fundamentally estranged, parents back together. Read More

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Sundance Review: CAMP X-RAY

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“Camp X-Ray”
Directed by Peter Sattler
Starring Kristen Stewart, Peyman Moaadi, Lane Garrison, J.J. Soria, John Carroll Lynch
117 Mins

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Agenda-slinging, headline drama Camp X-Ray transcends expiration date glitz with universal tale of friendship. Burdened with a Guantanamo Bay premise and Twilight sensation Kristen Stewart in a headlining spot, expectations may come half-popped but Camp X-Ray manages to steer clear of inflammatory hot topic territory as Stewart and co-star Peyman Moaadi probe powerhouse territory.

Strange though it may be to imagine the perpetually dulled Bella putting in a considerable performance, her work here is undoubtedly the pinnacle of her career as it stands. Not exclusively involved in high-profile, low-quality blockbusters, Stewart has peppered her cast credits with the occasion indie film and has even gained mild praise for her work in On the Road and Adventureland, but neither carries the burden of proof that she brings to the table here.

This type of zero to sixty change spotlights a shifting celebrity ethos and proves Stewart wants to be around for a while longer. For a fantastic example of an actor turning a laughable career into a respectably credited empire, look to Matthew McCougnahey. She’s not there yet but baby steps Kristen, baby steps.

In Camp X-Ray, Stewart plays Amy Cole, a tabula rasa of an army woman. Battling gender stereotypes and the unwanted attention of her male counterparts, she exacts bottled frustration out on the detainees, a label she’s commanded to use in place of prisoner (otherewise they would be privy to Genova Convention statutes).

She’s certainly no polaroid-snapping prisoner-piler but her jaded indifference is a telling glimpse into U.S. indoctrination of a polarized world view. She’s trained to think there’s two sides to this war but learns that it’s infinitely more complex. When she meets Ali, or as he’s better known, 371, her concept of justice, goodness, and Army policy is thrown for a ringer.

Camp X-Ray could have capitalized on the good grace of one political camp or the other but it knowingly avoids falling into that pattern of tabloid drama. Peter Sattler is not fence-sitting either as he certainly gets his personal statements across. The intention is not to disgrace or discolor so much as it is to ponder and think.

When challenged to confront our biases, we come to know not just the world around us but ourselves, Sattler tells us. Cole, through her conversations with Ali, finds herself undergoing a spiritual transformation, letting go of blind judgement and trying to come to terms with the impossibility that is the current state of US affairs.

As Ali and Amy’s lives become intertwined, their relationship shifts, opening up the opportunity for conversation among equals. With this table set, a pensive and powerful exchange unfolds about what one ought to do with a caged lion that serves as the film’s bated breath highlight and a phenomenally powerful metaphorical footnote. Scenes like this, anchored by Stewart and Moaadi’s unflinching engagement with one another, give Camp X-Ray a chance to visceral body check its audience into taking a  long hard look at their own ingrained partisanship. There’s no denying, we could use more thought-provoking, if not entirely novel, films like this.

B

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Sundance Review: YOUNG ONES

by Posted in Festival Reviews

“Young Ones”
Directed by Jake Paltrow
Starring Nicholas Hoult, Michael Shannon, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Elle Fanning
100 Mins

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Sprawling future Western quais-epic Young Ones offers a poignant deconstruction of sci-fi and western films, an allegorical gaze into a murky future that strips both genres down to the studs and builds them up as one.

Brother of Gwenyth and Godson to Steven Speilberg, Jake Paltrow successfully brokers this moody, panoramic vista of draught dystopia by juxtaposing elements of hi-fi tech against the dust bowls and wind storms of plains life. Technology has taken great bounds forward, providing the illusion of solace to a society brought to their knees by perpetual thirst, but with water in such scarcity, this Western shanty town is on the brink of extinction. Life nectar that it is, water has become the new oil, a cherished commodity that’s become even more rare and necessary, a cause for showdowns and scuffles.

Opening on a brutally tense standoff between hero Ernest Holm (Michael Shannon) and two grubby water thieves, this expertly-realized world could conceivably be post-apocalyptic, sparsely occupied by a patchwork of desperate characters milling through stretches of sand-blasted country on a hunt for their next water source. Had it been such, it would risk bearing a striking resemblance to Cormac McCarthy‘s dystopia cannibal-drama The Road (which star Kodi Smit-McPhee also feautred in) but we soon learn that Ernest and son Jerome (Smit-McPhee) are not alone. They live in a desolate settlement built of stacked shoddy boxcars complete with black market baby sales, dry-lipped, sandy-haired beggars, and its own class of elite citizenry.

Ernest, a haunted, recovering alcoholic, has fruitlessly tried to convince the mob-like watermen to run a direct line to his desolate town but has been shot down. There’s life in the soil, he’s convinced. It, much like he, just needs another chance. Shannon sells haunted meditation, a character trait he’s perfected, and his watchful relationship with milquetoast son Jerome is a strong emotional platform for the narrative to rest on. Since The Road and Let Me In, McPhee has sprouted into an almost unrecognizable teenager but rather than fiddle with stodgy angst, his ‘becoming a man’ progression is a hat-tipping throwback to the Westerns of old.  

Nicholas Hoult and Elle Fanning play a young couple with their own update on Western boilerplate anchors. Hoult is willy and unscrupulous and Fanning, a housemaid dissatisfied with washing dishes (with sand, naturally). With Shannon and these three talented young actors, Young Ones lets the grit and speechless contemplation pile high, as any decent Western should. Better still, the landscape upon which this three-chaptered tale unfolds is so articulately designed that it feels as pronounced and occupied as Tatooine .
 
Like a Neill Blomkamp film, Young Ones soars when it’s building atmosphere. Stuck in the sun-bleached desert, we’re still acutely aware of the world at large. Radios blare affected sales announcements. Pack donkeys are phased out and replaced with Big Dog-style robotics. Supersonic jets boom overhead, ripping the sky from LA to NYC. In other parts of the world,  processing plants synthesis water with nuclear technology and smartphones fan out with conceivably inventive new wave tech. The world may be moving forward but, for all we’ve seen, humanity has stepped backwards.

A riveting series of chapters of once upon a time in the future west, Young Ones spins a unique take on clutching onto one’s manifest destiny. Rich with morose mood, towering metaphor, and dusty, dusty atmosphere, just watching it will leave you parched.

B+

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