Desert Review – High art meets trailer trash in this American horror film aesthetic | film

DDirector Joshua Erkman’s feature debut manages to deliver an impressively creepy horror exercise that’s also a send-up of horror conventions. At the same time, it feels like a strange evasion toward borderline abstraction and nameless ambiguity that drains all realism away, making this a polite exercise in filmmaking. But there’s no denying the level of craft on display, or the original way in which Erkman brings together practitioners of high art world discourse and low life, with bloody results. In broad terms, it certainly feels like something of another modern high-brow, low-brow scare, the kind of horror you might see in grad school in the weird-eyed I Saw the TV Glow, David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, or Ari Aster’s Hereditary. In other words: interesting, sure, but maybe a bit too pretentious for the hardcore dogs.

In “Desert,” we first meet photographer Alex (Kay Lennox) as he drives around the dry terrain of California’s Yucca Valley, listening to contemporary jazz on the luxury sound system of his SUV and stopping to take pictures of abandoned buildings. He shoots his images on a fancy 8 x 10 inch rig that uses photographic plates that must be exposed for 10 seconds. His subjects include abandoned cinemas and the remains of abandoned military bases in Ghost Town – although he suggests in a voicemail to his wife Sam (Sarah Lind) that he might turn to portraits for a while. It’s clear he’s not particularly interested in the people who live here, though when a couple (Zachary Ray Sherman and Ashley Smith) knock on the hotel room next door, offering a taste of turpentine and a chance to party, Alex is too polite/too weak to resist.

Not long after a flurry of swashbuckling action and bright colours, all set to electronic dance music (EDM), the film creates a standstill that feels too much like another popular horror film to spoil the main development. Suffice it to say, after that things continue and we follow different heroes, this time Alex’s wife Sam and private investigator Harold (David Yeo) who find themselves drifting down the same lost highways in the valley.

Erkman, a one-time cinematographer himself, and director of photography Jay Kittle, bring out an art-book view of the economically depressed West, a style that’s like the Americana of Joel Meyerowitz meets the ruin porn of Yves Marchand and Romain Mivry. We are no doubt meant to infer that Alex and the other visitors see only the area’s exploitable aesthetics, photogenicly surrender to the forces of nature, and are blind to the real human evil that exists out there—in plain sight as the final shot confirms. This may not be a very profound message, but the visual and editorial styles are more enigmatic and charming.