Review by Amos Lassen
By: Amos Lassen
"The Strange Ones"
An Atmospheric Psychological Indie Suspense Drama
Amos Lassen
Scruffy twenty-something Nick (Alex Pettyfer) and his younger teenage companion Sam (James Freedson-Jackson) claim to be siblings although apparently this...
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"The Strange Ones"
An Atmospheric Psychological Indie Suspense Drama
Amos Lassen
Scruffy twenty-something Nick (Alex Pettyfer) and his younger teenage companion Sam (James Freedson-Jackson) claim to be siblings although apparently this is not so, travel in a station wagon across rural upstate New York supposedly on a camping vacation that might appear normal but soon yields to a dark and complex mysterious story. It seems that they are running away from something.
The story is split the into halves. The first is all about the mysterious road trip on the back roads; the second is about the trip's repercussions. A sense of dread and menace keeps things going as the viewer tries to understand what the older man is doing with the younger one.
It is puzzling and taxing to follow this misleading story and all that's left out so by he time the explanation begins, I was a bit too worn out to care even with the wonderful cinematography by Todd Banhazl.
Early on, Sam is asked where he comes from and he replies succinctly that the comes from the woods. Much later, he elaborates on what he means, but those two words "the woods" continue to echo in the mind. The filmmaking team of Christopher Radcliff and Laura Wolkstein give us a primordial story filled with dreamlike symbols from humanity's past-roads, forests, caves, clouds, the sun-and its characters move through it in a way that we just to accept what we see. the kind where you're not sure how literally you're supposed to take anything. The story is told in a nonlinear, almost prismatic style. Somehow young Sam ended up in the passenger seat of a car driven by Nick .
It's clear from the start that this is an unnatural relationship, though we don't learn all the details until the end. Nick and Sam present themselves as brothers, and Sam unconvincingly tells everyone he meets that his name is Jeremiah, but their uneasy bond is apparent to everyone. The movie follows them as they drive across a rural landscape, eating in restaurants and staying at a motel. There are shocking flash-cuts of either hideously beautiful or viscerally upsetting imagery-a house in flames, splattering a character's face-and touches that seem not-quite-surreal. These remain unexplained. This is one of those movies that either one is completely into it or not; there does not seem to be a middle ground. The film makes some very large and confident decisions and throughout, there are little stylistic touches, like the very slow zooms into landscapes and faces and the rigidly centered compositions, that impart a horror-movie-like feeling.
I found that the movie telegraphs the gist of what it's about to reveal pretty early on, and by the time it finally confirms suspicions, you cannot help but wonder why. Even with disturbing and sometimes heartbreaking performances by both lead actors, Sam and Nick seem more like concepts than actual people. The story is assembled like a jigsaw puzzle that one can "solve," immediately or gradually, but the characters are characters that suffer a bit from being treated as puzzles. This is the first full-length feature film from the directors and I get the sense that great things will come from them. This film however seems to be searching for a place to be. Because it is built around a secret, it is hard to discuss the plot.
It opens on a vaguely dramatized event that will haunt the characters and be eventually redefined, of course, by a climactic revelation. Anecdotes compose entire narrative with isolated capsules of incident united by the looming dread that's theoretically comes out of the opening sequence. There's a creepy sexual tension between Sam and the handsome and much-older Nick, embodied by lingering shots of Nick gazing at a shirtless Sam, by their proclivity for sharing the same bed, and by Sam's almost psychotic jealousy over Nick's flirtation with a motel employee, Kelly (Emily Althaus).
It is suggested that Sam lives in a sort of dissociative state. Sam tells Nick that he can't discern the difference between dreams and reality, while Nick asserts that reality can be willed by the mind into nonexistence and he shows how this can be. Unfortunately the film becomes rote and repetitive, and the filmmakers' fetish for slowness brings about tediousness. The mixture of sensationalism and self-conscious artiness is disingenuous.