Gazer
To those who don’t know her Frankie Rhodes seems distant, distracted, aloof, staring into the distance when she should be paying attention to her job at the gas station, another complaint about poor service forcing her boss to finally let her go with a handful of cash which she splits between three small piles back at her spartan, undecorated apartment: rent, food, and her savings for her estranged daughter Cynthia.
In the care of her mother-in-law Diane since the death of her husband Roger which she cannot explain despite having been in the house at the time, it was during one of her episodes of lost time, suffering from an extreme form of dyschronometria, unable to judge the passage of time and zoning out during everyday activities, attending a grief therapy group and told by her doctor that her degenerative neurological disorder is progressing.
A slow-burn thriller paranoid of a wandering soul lost in the discontinuity of her own life which treads the same fractured and unfriendly suburban streets as Lynch and early Cronenberg, Gazer is the feature directorial debut of Ryan J Sloan from a script co-written with Ariella Mastroiannia who plays the stoic and determined Frankie, cut off from society and what remains of her family and desperate for connection as she trawls every dingy and run-down location in Jersey for answers.
Clinging to her sadness as though it were her last possession and lost in confusion, anchored only by her self-recorded self-help tapes, Frankie is vulnerable, opening up to one of the other group participants Paige (Renee Ganger) the moment she reaches out t with her own story of loss, the suicide of her mother; Frankie needing money and she needing to disappear, Paige offers cash if Frankie will help her retrieve her car from her possessive brother.
Her cognitive impairment making Frankie an easy target for exploitation, an easy fall guy in a grander scheme who cannot defend themselves when they have no notion of where they might have been at any given time, Gazer plays like Rear Window as experienced by the characters of Memento reimagined as an eighties indie movie, bleak, bare, nihilistic and brave, but not quite as coherent as it should be even given the circumstances, Frankie not the only one who should be concerned that loose ends do not connect or align quite as they should.
The central premise an interesting one, a person lost when they cannot connect to others or their own actions, any narrative is allowed a conceit as a central hook upon which to hang its story, but beyond the acceptable contrivances the implausibility of Gazer continues with conspicuous clues, gossiping neighbours and conveniently unlocked doors and, in the final act, Frankie’s decision to traverse the city on foot rather than telling the police of the imminent danger, Sloan at least opting to close the film on melancholy ambiguity rather than a neatly tied bow of sentimentality, Frankie gazing into a mirror as though it is the only way she can understand what has happened.
Glasgow Film Festival continues until Sunday 9th March
