In short: Octane (2003)

Senga Wilson (Madeleine Stowe) is driving her daughter Nat (Mischa Barton) home from a stint with Nat’s father/Senga’s ex-husband. The two have quite the night drive in front of them, a situation that isn’t made any more pleasant by the fact that Nat and Senga are in perpetual battle - this evening’s casus belli being Senga forbidding Nat going to some sort of music festival with her friends - nor by Senga running on no sleep and a lot of psychopharmacology.

After a heavy row, Nat steals away with a teenage hitchhiker she just met an hour or so ago and her said hitchhiker’s freakish friends . Unfortunately, these guys belong to some sort of highway cult led by a man calling himself The Father (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, rather unfatherly). They’re into brainwashing, dressing up as cops, ambulance drivers or truckers, causing car accidents as well as staging fake accidents. In a thematic curve ball, they are also heavily involved in bloodletting but cults all too often ignore the aesthetic pleasures of a coherent field of symbols.

After first being tricked by a fake cop who is part of the cult – not that the actual cops will turn out to be any help - Senga takes up the pursuit of the cult herself, a project that is made somewhat more difficult by her tendency to hallucinate a peculiar motivational speaker (Martin McDougall).

All the while, a man in a recovery van (Norman Reedus) is watching everyone involved, loitering sinisterly.

Marcus Adams’s Octane (working from a script by the great Stephen Volk) is a somewhat peculiar film that attempts to enrich a basic thriller plot with plenty of weirdness as well as a thematic emphasis on the strangeness that seems to be common when driving through the US by night. At least if you follow this British movie shot in Luxembourg.

Often, the film’s basic strangeness and willingness to aim for the dream-like instead of the gritty is quite a strength, providing it with a mood very much its own, and perhaps even a degree of actual thoughts underpinning it. From time to time, though, Octane drifts off into what feels like needless obscurity; at a few other times (particularly when it comes to Nat’s silly adventures in the cult’s brainwashing truck) its surrealism is rather on the silly side, with an adorably conservative idea of sex and drugs.

This is certainly no film if you want a straightforward thriller with a logical plot. When it works, it’s all strange ideas and waking dream-like direction and stuff that somewhat makes sense on a metaphorical or thematic level, and not so much on the field of narrative logic. Which is often the kind of thriller I prefer, so I found myself rather taken with Octane, not despite but because its plot logic breaks down repeatedly, if it ever existed at all.

Three Films Make A Post: A warrior without equal. A weapon without limits

The Messengers (2007): And then there was the time when the Pang Brothers Danny and Oxide went to Saskatchewan to shoot a movie for a US company that’s supposed to be taking place in North Dakota, while none of the actors even attempted to pretend to be Midwesterners (in a way even a German notices). It has a perfectly decent cast including Penelope Ann Miller, Dylan McDermott and Kristen Stewart in a non-horrible performance, looks – it’s a Pang Brothers joint after all – really nice, and culminates in a finale as crappy as only the Pangs do them. In between there’s a run-through of variants of many a classic horror scene (done ever so slightly to very much worse, of course) and little that’ll catch one’s interest.

It’s all perfectly inoffensive, but when has that ever been a good thing to be said about a horror film?

The Messengers 2 (2009): Of course, this direct-to-DVD sequel-in-name-only by Martin Barnewitz manages to be even less interesting than the Pang Brothers film that came before. It’s got little of the slickness of its predecessor and clearly not much of an idea what to put in place of that slickness. Despite decent actors like Norman Reedus and Heather Stephens, there’s little to see on the acting front either, for the script can’t do ambiguous characters or just internal complexity at all, but then, this is the sort of movie that thinks not going to church and “taking His name in vain” (seriously) is something that can only be the first step on the path to adultery and cursed-scarecrow incited murder.

The Caller (2011): So props to this US-Puerto Rican production directed by Matthew Parkhill for at least leaving the baby Jesus home. But I’m being unfair, for this is actually a rather decent thriller of the timey-wimey sub-genre, with a good lead performance by Rachelle Lefevre, a well-cast handful of other actors (well, and Stephen Moyer whose attraction this heterosexual guy can’t fathom, but we can’t have everything), and even a script that doesn’t go for any kind of idiotic twist in the end but works fairly and consequential from its premise. While I’m not particularly excited about the film – it is good but never quite as riveting as it perhaps could be – this is the sort of random Netflix find that makes one look at one’s queue with a degree of hope, and certainly a film it’s easy enough to appreciate.