Tyger Tyger
Luke picked the wrong day to collect his prescription, lucky shirt notwithstanding, caught up in an armed robbery with good intentions and bad execution, Blake intending to seize the medication and redistribute it to the needy, her partner Cole planning to see to his own needs first, and Luke caught in the middle, forced by Blake to swap jackets to distract the approaching LAPD.
Finding she has Luke’s prescription slip with his address, Blake approaches him to make amends; understandably hostile, the situation is worsened by the impulsive behaviour of Blake’s mute teenage charge, Bobby, who attacks him, apparently necessitating the need to bundle him unconscious into the trunk and kidnap him.
Unwilling participant on a road trip to Free City where the recipients are waiting for the stolen medicine, in debt to his dealer and with his stash destroyed by another of Bobby’s bratty outbursts, Luke has little option but to throw his lot in with the pair on their way to Mexico, beset by problems, distractions, unhelpful hoteliers and a dangerously unreliable contact who may be planning on turning them into the law.
The feature debut of writer/director Kerry Mondragon, Tyger Tyger, named for the William Blake poem which adorns Luke’s not-so-lucky shirt, is not so much unsettling as frustrating, lit and shot as a music video with sunsets, headlights, cheekbones and flames, often in slow motion, but with any tenuous narrative as lost as the characters who share too much for anyone hoping to remain safely incognito.
Waylaid into a commune of detoxing city folk, part chicken farm, part rehab, part skate park, part open mic night, Luke and Blake (Dylan Sprouse and Sam Quartin) start an improbable romance, a reversal of more common arrangement of the trope of the abductee falling in love with their abuser with he as the kidnapped junkie and she the painfully inept do-gooder, but nonetheless just as unbelievable.
Shot largely in the southern California squatter community of Slab City and populated with stoned eccentrics beyond help even if they wanted it, Tyger Tyger is gloriously filmed but feels as though it was improvised throughout, a road trip with no map, people running from their pasts with no vision of their future, existing only in the moment but with no greater goal or ambition than their next fix, a tragedy perhaps but one which wallows rather than strives.
Tyger Tyger will be available on digital platforms from Monday 28th June
