A Desert
It’s around two decades since photographer Alex Clark found moderate success with Death of the New West, his book on the decaying and deserted spaces of ghost towns which died as first businesses and then families moved out, malls, garages and mulitplexes given to dust and graffiti, spaces once commercial, residential and industrial now abandoned.
Calling his wife Sam every night as he drives through the desert and tries to recapture that spark with his vintage camera, she has not heard from him in a week and has contacted a former police officer turned private detective, Harold Palladino, in an effort to find Alex, the last trace of him a stay at a similarly run-down roadside motel in Yucca Valley.
Directed by Joshua Erkman from a script co-written by Bossi Baker, the trip through A Desert is long and slow, a neo-noir thriller road trip punctuated by moments of distraction but composed largely of waiting for something to happen, the sideshow of low-rent whores and aggressive pimps who exploit the lonely insufficient to offset the growing tab.
The characters sketches, Alex (Kai Lennox) is easily led by Susie (Ashley Smith) and Renny (Zachary Ray Sherman), introduced as her brother after they were overheard arguing in the adjoining room, the contrast between he and Sam (Sarah Lind) inferred but inescapable, they sufficiently comfortable to make a living through art while the rougher underdogs peddle flesh to scrape by, their own and that of others.
The recurring image that of a projection screen, in a derelict cinema, at a drive-in now turned flea market, sometimes blank, sometimes illuminated but empty or filled with monochrome movies or pornography, violent and coerced, Renny and his accomplices are content creators who try to fill the void in the same way as Alex does though for a very different audience, unconcerned with societal decay so much as moral depravity.
A film of empty people in empty places which superficially recalls Kalifornia, Palladino (David Yow) the standard alcoholic ex-cop whose judgement is as lacking as the subject of his search, deeper motivations beyond the immediacy of theft or the simple thrill of violence are as unexplored as why Renny apparently drinks the blood of his first victim or Alex spent a whole day, from hungover dawn to dusk, hanging with an obviously odious and unstable man; undeniably beautifully and bleakly shot by Jay Keitel, A Desert needs more substance to fill it with meaning.
A Desert is available on Shudder now
