Gazer review: An impressive, lo-fi and disarmingly intense debut

Irish Times

5 days ago

GAZER
    
Director
:
Ryan J. Sloan
Cert
:
15A
Genre
:
Mystery
Starring
:
Ariella Mastroianni, Marcia Debonis, Renee Gagner, Jack Alberts, Tommy Kang
Running Time
:
2 hrs 14 mins
Ryan J Sloan's Gazer springs from the grungy fringes of
American
indie
cinema
with the urgent pulse of a noir and the stylings of Barbara Loden's
Wanda
. Lo-fi, disarmingly intense, and shot on textured 16mm by cinematographer Matheus Bastos, this impressive debut feature casts a twitchy, retro shadow over the less salubrious parts of New Jersey.
Frankie (a mesmerising Ariella Mastroianni, who co-wrote the script with producer, editor and director Sloane) plays a single mother trying to wrestle back control of her fractured family and equally fragmented psyche.
Frankie suffers from dyschronometria, a rare condition that distorts her perception of time. To cope, she records second-by-second audio prompts reminding her what she's doing and where she is. These serve as both narrative scaffolding and existential red flags, tethering us to her unravelling mind and blackouts.
The financially struggling heroine takes a one-time job offered by a stranger named Claire (Renee Gagner). The task: retrieve a car, allegedly belonging to Claire, and leave it out in the wasteland. Inevitably, the vehicle turns up with a corpse in the boot, and Frankie's fingerprints on the wheel.
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Mastroianni's haunted performance plays out against dim interiors, grimy streets, anonymous motels and buzzing petrol stations, with the air of a sinner wandering through purgatory. Mobile phones, we are told, are bad for her, an absence that keeps her rooted in a decaying, tactile world.
The score by Steve Matthew Carter, all despondent horns and unsettling reverb, adds to the distress. It's impossible not to think of
Christopher Nolan's
early work and the classic paranoia of
Brian DePalma's
Blow Out and
Francis Ford Coppola's
The Conversation
. But Gazer swerves from retro pastiche into Cronenbergian body horror, as the already unreliable narrator becomes increasingly unmoored.