By Sylvana Fernandez
Bellflower
Director: Evan Glodell
Released: 2011
A pair of 20-something best friends from Wisconsin move to Los Angeles, where they literally spend all their free time building flame-throwers and souping up a muscle car as homage to the Mad Max movies.
Woodrow (director-writer Evan Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson) are waiting for a post-apocalyptic world, but their oddly blissful lives spent creating deadly weapons are destroyed rather spectacularly by a much more ordinary event: a free-spirited girl named Milly (Jessie Wiseman) and the group of characters they begin to hang out with when Woodrow starts dating her.
In four words, Bellflower is surreal, funny, bittersweet and scary, with a plot that stays interesting despite not always making sense. Made for less than $20,000, it’s visually impressive, full of rich colors and dreamlike sequences that only make its story of an ugly break-up and the friendship that survives it more powerful.
Take Shelter
Director: Jeff Nichols
Released: 2011
Take Shelter feels, in a way, like the indie film equivalent of a movie like Shutter Island or Inception—except it is simplified: the director isn’t playing mind games with the audience, he’s just showing us the ones character Curtis (Michael Shannon) plays with himself.
A family man in small-town Middle America, Curtis works in construction to give his wife Samantha (Tree of Life’s Jessica Chastain) and his young disabled daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart) a comfortable life. It all starts to unravel when he begins to have apocalyptic visions and becomes torn between the impulse to save his family from what he sees or to save them from himself.
As much a chilling portrait of descent into mental illness as it is a comment on the healthcare system in the US, Take Shelter’s biggest strength is its heartbreaking performances. Shannon is excellent and convincing as a good person suffering through bad things and Chastain holds her own as a worried mother at odds with what it means to be a loyal wife to a sick man who might just be dangerous.
Without
Director: Mark Jackson
Released: 2011
Rounding out this month’s trio of creepy, dark indie films released in 2011 is Without. A movie without violence or visions, it deals with something more common: grief.
Joslyn (newcomer Joslyn Jensen) is just one year out of high school and for reasons unknown to us at the beginning of the film, she takes a job as a caretaker for an old man (Ron Carrier) in a large house on a remote wooded island. She doesn’t get reception on her phone or Wi-Fi on her computer. The television signal falters, and sometimes she wakes up to find that her phone has moved from where she left it the night before, even though her charge is in a vegetative state and confined to a wheelchair.
What sounds like the set-up for a horror movie or a psychological thriller turns out to be something else, and the result is genuine and haunting. Director Mark Jackson accomplishes so much with so little: Without is a truly sad film worth seeing and Jensen’s brilliant performance stays with you long after the credits roll.
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