Ezra Dunmore
Booth work in Glasgow, four nights a week, mostly digital now and I have made my peace with it. I notice lamps and gate weave before I notice plot. My flat has a sheet on the wall and a very loud fan.
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Booth work in Glasgow, four nights a week, mostly digital now and I have made my peace with it. I notice lamps and gate weave before I notice plot. My flat has a sheet on the wall and a very loud fan.
Genuinely dark, and the darkness is doing work rather than hiding a budget. There is a moment where the torch beam finds the treeline and you can see about four feet into it and the film holds there for an uncomfortable while. Somebody in that crew knows exactly what a lens can and cannot see at night.
Twenty nine minutes and about nine of them are on a motorbike, shot from angles that suggest a crew that either did not have permits or did not care. The traffic sequence is genuinely thrilling and genuinely dangerous looking. My worry is what a full series does with a character this thin. Right now he is a physical performance and a jacket.
I ran this for a late show and had to fight the room's brightness the whole way through. It is a genuinely dark film, in the literal sense, and it punishes a bad screen. On a good one there is a shot of the water at night where you can just see the far bank, and it is terrifying. Bring your lights down before you start it.
Ninety seven minutes in a logging camp and for the first forty of them nothing happens except work. That is the trap. By the time something does happen you know exactly how heavy everything is, how far the truck is, how long the walk back takes. The dread is engineering. The last act loses its nerve slightly. The first two do not.
Sixteen minutes shot almost entirely under streetlights and it never turns into orange soup, which is a small miracle. There is a handoff at a bus shelter done in one take with a focus pull I would like to shake somebody's hand about. It goes soft for a beat on the wrong face and then finds the right one. I have watched that pull maybe twenty times.
A hundred and two minutes of people failing to leave Los Angeles and I have never wanted to visit more. It is loose in the middle. About twenty minutes of it is two men in a car and only twelve of those minutes are good. Then the wedding happens and the film remembers what it is. The last scene, in a doughnut shop at six in the morning, is one of my favourite endings on here.
