Despite whatever aesthetic pluses and minuses this obscure 2008 independent film by Gabriel Fleming contains (and there are arguments to be made mostly for it in terms of its extraordinary musical score, dream-like pacing, excellent performances, and exquisitely atmospheric cinematography as well as against it for its rather predictable storyline) one cannot help oneself from becoming pulled in and fascinated by the strange and disturbing undertones beneath this tale of painfully unrequited and deeply repressed passions that takes place in a flashback-laced but mainly dusk-to-dawn period on a Halloween night in San Francisco, suffused with what appears to be the factual actualities of youthful and tragic early death, serving as an overriding metaphor for a personal and inevitable loss of innocence. Notice, if you will, the emphatic presence of a wall poster of legendary goth band Joy Division (23-year-old lead singer Ian Curtis committed suicide in 1980), the quick, subtle cuts to on-rushing emergency 911 vehicles, and the casual remarks about wanting to die before reaching the age of 30, including the obvious visual signifiers of skeletons, ghosts, and most significantly a haunting and expressively funereal mask that essentially acts as the film's Greek chorus and central symbolic conceit (the covering over of true feelings, the false façade of gender roles and identities, the burial of past secrets) as our four main characters wander aimlessly through the anonymous and party-packed city streets in search of an indefinable and increasingly desperate "good time", eventually stumbling on to the abandoned corpse of a young man in the middle of Golden Gate Park under an ice-blue moon in the last and lonely hours of the fading holiday. Their nocturnal (if not metaphysical) journey from crowded urban spaces towards the liberating primal landscape of the forest allows tortured revelations to finally rise to the surface along with a rainy and emotionally cleansing November morning. Thoughts drift back to the night actor River Phoenix died on the streets of West Hollywood in the early morning hours of Halloween 1993, and whether or not that particularly tragic and generation-defining moment in time was on the mind of the director, one cannot help but ponder its relation to both the body in the park and one of the climactic lines of dialogue at the break of dawn ("the sun wont be rising for us") that surrounds its main theme of heartbreak, psychological self-deception, and the deep and lasting scars of societal and sexual hypocrisy.
