Ocean City Monster Building

Interesting low budget thriller-drama that takes place in a small town in Upstate NY. A mayor is found dead in a car with a 15 yrs old female. A detective from Albany leads the investigation and encounters the suspicious, sometimes racist, attitude of the local sheriff. She is originally migrated from Haiti and became a cop and she doesn't buy into the attitude of the local authorities that just want to close the case exonerating the mayor post-humanous. She forms a bond with the mayor adopted daughter from Vietnam, and they find common language because of their backgrounds. The plot thickens with several twists and turns and the case is being closed under pressure, without figuring out all the details. When they are revealed in the end, a sad truth of abuse and malignant intentions are exposed. The story takes place in 1984, before the Mondale-Reagan elections, and the filmmaker definitely wants to say something about the American dream in the eyes of immigrants, but it's not clear exactly. The film is very low budget, shot in monochromatic colors, better than black and white, but stands firm enough as a whole.

There is something that I really like about this. It doesn't 100% add up, and I'm not sure what the title has to do with it or at least the first half, but the story really gels as it goes along. Also, the lead performances by the daughter Sally and detective are really good especially when you piece it all together. I was thrown off initially by the hand held camera and the mellow color, but when I read that the Filmmaker was following the Dogme 95 style it kind of made more sense, and I had to give the filmmaker credit for attempting to follow this fairly consistently despite breaking a couple of the rules as many do.