Lonely Place

Director Kevin Ackerman seems to be channeling David Lean as he directs this delicious, atmospheric "Alfred Hitchcock Presents"-style short. Gorgeous visuals, lush romantic music, great atmosphere and constantly building tension in this outstanding thriller that packs a real emotional punch. Kudos to the stellar cast: Kurtwood Smith, Tess Harper and Tomas Arana.

Great tech credits: beautiful cinematography, excellent editing and sound work. John Ottman's score is a must-listen. Kevin Ackerman has delivered a film that stands both as a clever homage to the classic film noir, and also stands out as an excellent short film.

I attended the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival and viewed all the other films and Lonely Place really stood out with no fancy special effects that would steer you away from the deep expression of film making. Wonderful casting with credible, professional and recognizable actors. This film is truly a breath of fresh air with a down to earth location on a farm.

I enjoyed the retro scenes and authenticity of props. Cinematography is gorgeous. Suspenseful and entertaining. Kevin Ackerman did a superb job in capturing the feel and struggle of farm life. This is a film you don't want to miss! This will make you crave peaches. I look forward to Kevin Ackerman's next film.

I recently caught this at a festival of short films and it far and away stood out among all the other films that screened. Lonely Place has a superb visual look to it, is consistently involving in its storytelling, and features an excellent lead performance from Tess Harper. The film doesn't need any trickery or flash, instead relying on superb craftsmanship that is quite rare for this form. Writer/director Kevin Ackerman shows a command of the medium that is both assured and evocative, using silence, mood, and furtive looks to tell his engrossing tale of a woman done wrong. With nary a false note, Lonely Place sticks with you long after the film is over. See it if you can on the big screen.

I got the chance to see this film at a Film Noir festival held at the American Cinemateque in Hollywood, and I was very pleased.

This picture harkens back to a different era. One when suspense and drama were handled deftly by masters like Alfred Hitchcock.

A modern film set in the late 1940's, Tess Harper plays the farmer's wife caught in a rural dilemma. Her performance as the mouse caught in a box with two cats is amazing. (Where has she been lately?) Kurtwood Smith is the old tired farmer, and Tomas Arana is the mysterious stranger who just stopped by for a visit.

The tension here gets thick, and you don't know who to root for...until the end.

This film will probably go the festival route, so if you see it on your program, and you like well paced suspensfull noir's, give it a look and you won't be disappointed. (8/10)

MitchellMan

There are so many things to admire about Kevin Ackerman's short feature Lonely Place that it's hard to know what to praise first. The meticulous beauty of its physical detail and visual realization are two obvious virtues. Indeed, as John Ottman's oceanic music swells beneath that rainfall of ripe peaches at the fade-in, one might describe Ackerman's filmic style as symphonically meticulous. The place is a farm north of Fresno, California, in 1949. Tess Harper is the mistress of the spread, an intense, frustrated housewife who attends to her duties with the unseeing steadiness of a sleepwalker. Kurtwood Smith is her cranky, neglectful husband -- a man who seems to have whittled his 'round-the-clock facial expression from the same wood he's used to make those tobacco pipes he's always either clenching in his teeth or emptying, with annoying precision, in spots his wife has just cleaned. Tomas Arana is the raggedy drifter who appears at this couple's peach tree like a Biblical figment. He seems more skeletal than flesh, and more silhouette than man. He oozes menace -- a quality that, to the wife's near-hysterical bewilderment, goes unnoticed by her husband as he hires this man to help with their peach harvest. What ensues is a demonic retelling of the Garden of Eden story, in which Eve finds herself alone with two serpents.

Because I count Kevin Ackerman as a close friend, I'm in a position to know the years of hard work he spent getting this film right -- and like many friends, I often worried that he was chasing a holy grail of perfection that would stay forever out of his reach. I needn't have worried. Whatever imperfections may be present in Lonely Place, excellence is achieved throughout -- even technical mastery, of a precocious kind. Ackerman's exquisite dissolves, which marry the roundness of peaches to that of full moons and the whorls of circular darkness which gape in the mouth of a man's pipe, are not simply there to show off his style, much as one might marvel -- they also underscore the interior transitions, the psychic puzzle-pieces gradually coming together in the mind of a woman being threatened by a violence that is welling as much from within herself as from the two wretched men in her life.

Lonely Place is a strikingly well-wrought first film, a feature in miniature. Ackerman succeeds precisely because he has been so steadfast in seeing its music, rhythms and visual bravura through to their optimal states of power, and narrative effect.