Gazer

Gazer should have you seated. Shot on grainy 16mm, it has that rare, electric quality where every frame feels alive and slightly dangerous. It's a noir, sort of, but more like a fever dream that borrows the paranoia of the '70s and fuses it with something modern and unpredictable.

Ariella Mastroianni is phenomenal. Her performance is raw and utterly magnetic. A performance that makes you forget you're watching a performance at all. The story itself is lean and taut, but what really sticks is the atmosphere, which is tense, strange, and darkly funny in moments you don't expect.

Worth your attention.

One of the cardinal sins in making a captivating thriller is overstuffing the picture with too many story elements, making what should be something intriguing into something muddled, difficult to follow and unfulfilling. That can be made all the worse by incorporating extraneous filler that amounts to little more than padding while unsuccessfully trying to pass itself off as something allegedly poignant and meaningful to the overall story. And, if the filmmaker throws in some poor, at times unintelligible sound quality for good measure, you've got a recipe for a production that misses the mark by a decidedly wide margin. That, unfortunately, is the case with writer-director Ryan J. Sloan's debut feature, an overlong slog that starts out well but overstays its welcome for all of the foregoing reasons. Frankie Rhodes (Ariela Mastroianni), a widowed single mother struggling with financial difficulties, custody issues involving her young daughter and a terminal illness that's causing declining cognitive impairment, struggles to cope with these challenges but often to no avail. However, when she meets a mysterious woman (Renee Gagner) who promises her a financial windfall to help her out of a bind, Frankie jumps at the chance, only to find herself unwittingly caught up in a web of deceit and criminality in which she becomes the suspected culprit. If the story were left at that, it might well have made for an absorbing noir mystery. Instead, however, the plot is infused with an array of seemingly unnecessary (and often underdeveloped and/or inadequately explained) story threads that only bog down the picture's flow. This includes several supernatural, surreal and arguably bizarre sequences that appear to occur in the dream state (even if not fully recognized as such by the protagonist or sufficiently explained for viewers). The result is a run-on story that runs out of gas about midway through, becoming a progressively tedious watch that fails to maintain audience attention. To its credit, the film's stylistic qualities are somewhat engaging and show some promise - at least at the outset - but they're far from enough to sustain viewer interest as the saga haphazardly plays out toward what I ultimately found to be an unsatisfying conclusion. From this project, it would seem the filmmaker has potential to create works that are visually involving but that definitely need more solid narrative foundations to make them work as fully fleshed-out finished products, something that's sorely lacking here. Perhaps "Gazer" represents a shakedown vehicle for the director to work out the bugs and prepare for better developed future projects (and, if so, then this may not be an entirely wasted effort). However, the next time out, the filmmaker needs to show improvement if there's to be a next time after that.

Wild-eyed Frankie is distracted. Distracted to death.

Ariella Mastroianni inhabits the doll-like protagonist, a single mother with escalating problems she tries valiantly to chase down. Darn near impossible since she cannot experience the passage of time without constant prompts. Dyschronomentia proves a hurdle for everyday tasks, but something else when it comes to messing with memory.

Makes holding down a job impossible, and executing daily tasks quite the adventure. All confusion and anxiety, Frankie's life is spiralling out of control. She has lost custody of her daughter, the life of her husband, and much of her sanity. When a stranger appears with possible solutions, Frankie dives into an ill-advised adventure to recapture what is left of her former life.

"Gazer" is a moody, stylish noir thriller where very little is what it seems, and utilizing the point of view of a scattered lead keeps things nicely jumbled. Who knows what exactly is going on when Frankie is the plot guide? Still, it is easy to root for the plucky heroine as she valiantly tries to right all the wrongs.

Some bizarre David Cronenberg style dream episodes add a touch of surrealistic horror to the stew, and offer clues as to what transpired in Frankie's very murky past, but the film works best when working in a classic whodunnit mode. A little lengthy, but worth the ride.

Makes for pretty good cinema.

• hipCRANK.