NIHILISTIC neo-noir road movie A Desert is the unsettling and seductive debut feature from director Joshua Erkman.
Now streaming on Shudder, it tells the story of wayfaring photographer Alex Clark (Kai Lennox) who takes a trip into the abandoned American Southwest to reconnect with his art, and sense of self after meeting a midlife bump on the path of life.
Alex’s pilgrimage into the arid and harsh Mojave Desert sees him spend his lonesome days turning his camera on discarded Nevadan ghost towns, cemeteries and military testing sites while searching deep within himself for answers to those big questions around his very existence.
The fact that the snap unhappy lensman takes to the unforgiving and haunting landscape of the Mojave to help find himself fills Erkman’s debut film with a heavy sense of foreboding. An ill wind blows across the otherworldly desert plains and it’s not long before Alex’s road trip takes an unexpected turn for the worse.
Easily lead, and clearly looking for something other than himself, his voyage of discovery soon takes a departure of terrifying proportions when he crosses paths with his psychotic motel neighbours. Renny (Zachary Ray Sherman) and Susie Q (Ashley Smith) come off like a loved up Charles Manson and Aileen Wuornos with eyes only for the forlorn nomad next door.
Soon after this hapless encounter, Alex’s wife Sam (Sarah Lind) enters the fray and hires disgraced private detective Harold Palladino, played by Jesus Lizard frontman David Yow, to go find her dawdling excuse of a husband. Parts Coen Brothers genre-bending and David Lynchian surrealism, A Desert is unnerving and downright brutal in places, especially when humanity’s ugly side is put under the parching glare of the desert sun.
Bewitching and often distressing viewing, this is a dark and disturbing study on the decay of modern society. Sadly, despite its edginess, by the film’s visceral crescendo, it all falls away to nothing more than ambiguous swooning.
(3/5)