An indie film noir whose grungy low-fi aesthetics complement its classic fatalism, Gazer (April 4, in theaters) tells a twisted tale stitched together from bits and pieces of Rear Window, Memento, Videodrome, and Twin Peaks.
Regardless of that construction, writer/director Ryan J. Sloan’s feature debut is a uniquely head-spinning trip, following a young woman as she attempts to make sense of her murderous circumstances despite a mental condition that compromises her ability to perceive time. Energized by Ariella Mastroianni’s disoriented and frazzled lead performance, it begins unnervingly and ends, like all such sagas should, with haunting bleakness.
Frankie (Mastroianni) works at a New Jersey Sunoco, at least until she’s fired by her boss for once again spacing out and leaving her customers in the lurch. Frankie’s negligence is due to her dyschronometria, a degenerative affliction that prevents her from accurately assessing how much time has passed.
To cope with this disorder, Frankie takes pills and listens to tape recordings in which she encourages herself to focus, to watch, and to note everyone and everything in her immediate vicinity. It’s an analog trick that serves her only somewhat well, and it gets her into deadly trouble when—while looking around at the gas station shortly before her dismissal—she thinks she sees a female being struck in an upstairs apartment in the building across the street.
Frankie then sees a woman—the abused victim?—exit the residence, and shortly thereafter, she attends a support group for those suffering from the loss of loved ones and encounters that same individual. Her name is Paige (Renee Gagner), and at another meeting, they strike up a conversation, during which Frankie learns that Paige is coping with the overdose death of her mom and has an angry brother named Henry (Jack Alberts) who takes his fury out on her and whom she wants to flee. At a diner, she offers Frankie a deal: break into her apartment, snag her car keys, and drop her vehicle off in a remote spot in the Meadowlands, and she’ll pay $3,000.
“This could be my second chance,” muses Frankie, who’s in desperate need of cash so she can finally regain custody of her seven-year-old daughter Cynthia (Emma Pearson), who now lives with her grandmother Diane (Marianne Goodell). As becomes clear through a combination of conversational snippets and fragmentary flashbacks, Frankie’s husband Roger (Grant Schumacher) is dead, and though his demise was deemed a suicide, Diane suspects otherwise. Frankie’s memories—involving a wood-paneled cabin, a gun, and bloody hands—indicate that she may have had something to do with it and, thanks to her unreliable mind, simply doesn’t remember.
What Frankie is certain about is that Paige is in danger and helping her will facilitate her own goals. Thus, she agrees to this arrangement and successfully pulls off her assignment. After parking the car, however, time slips on her, and when she regains consciousness, it’s night, the vehicle’s trunk is open (a white sheet spilling out of it), and Paige is nowhere to be found.
Bewildered in multiple ways, Frankie wanders her grimy New Jersey environs in a gray hoodie, making regular pit stops at pay phones where she strives to contact Paige, Diane, and Cynthia, largely to unproductive results. Gazer has a distinctly ‘70s feel, from its grainy visuals and cinematographic devices (such as zooms from a great distance that locate Frankie on city streets) to its score of melancholic horns and its tape recorder-centric action (supposedly, Frankie can’t handle cell phones’ sensory overload).
Her odyssey takes her to a collection of grubby locales, be it the Lincoln Tunnel Motel, where the desk clerk demands more bribe money than Frankie can offer to give up the names of his customers, to a warehouse that Henry visits and which winds up being the site of a violent skirmish that exacerbates the protagonist’s confusion.
Mastroianni’s haunted eyes and downcast demeanor are expressions of Frankie’s interior monologue-scored condition, and the actress spikes her character’s desperation and determination with more than a bit of terrified instability.
Frankie isn’t completely in control of herself so she’s definitely not up for the madness at hand. Nonetheless, her sleuthing continues unabated, leading her to another home whose inhabitant may be related to a pharmaceutical company whose name she spied in Henry’s warehouse desk. She also attracts the attention of Detective Gale Chong (Tommy Kang), who brings her in for questioning and reveals that perhaps Frankie’s conception of reality isn’t quite as reliable as she assumes.
Gazer evokes the chill and scruffiness of northern New Jersey as a means of reflecting Frankie’s shabby, rickety headspace. At the same time, it indulges in some Cronenberg-by-way-of-Lynch trippiness in dream sequences involving flesh boxes, phallic umbilical cords, malevolent red lights, and schizophrenic close-ups of Frankie silently screaming with wide, horrified eyes. Sloan’s shout-outs are a bit blunt but they’re still effectively creepy and infuse the material with a touch of those auteurs’ strange, unnerving spirit.
It’s homage in service of a story that warrants, and welcomes, their particular sort of energy, and the film balances it with a strain of drab pessimism and portentousness, which mounts as the walls begin closing in on Frankie and she responds by taking increasingly drastic measures.
“Only in f---ing Jersey,” grumbles one of Frankie’s neighbors, and Gazer ultimately plays as the grubby East Coast flip side to its glossy West Coast cinematic ancestors. Secret identities, complicated secrets, treacherous betrayals, and questions of identity all course throughout Sloan’s film, and the director confidently steers his material (co-written by star Mastroianni) to the finish line, providing enough clarity to keep things straight while maintaining a modicum of uncertainty to the end.
With slouched shoulders and a subtly anxious demeanor (which implies she may be unhinged), Frankie is a novel quasi-gumshoe, driven to get to the bottom of both her tangled circumstances and herself—the latter of which remains arguably the most elusive truth. Courtesy of Mastroianni’s impressive turn, she proves a compelling guide through this contemporary mind-melter of a mystery, which suggests that noir’s black heart continues to beat as strongly as ever—including when it’s invigorated by inventive and exciting low-budget filmmaking.
