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If you’ve driven through the vast expanse of the California desert, you’ve probably experienced a certain edge-of-the-world mix of fascination and dread. And you no doubt know, too, that a sign announcing “Next service 72 miles,” like the one that appears in the opening minutes of Desert Road, is not a warning to be taken lightly. The solitary traveler in Shannon Triplett’s gripping mind-bender is neither irresponsible nor foolish, but her momentary lapse in judgment turns a pit stop into a nightmare, ever-deepening, that she’s determined to escape.
As the 20-something woman at the center of the taut mystery, Kristine Froseth (The Buccaneers, Sharp Stick) delivers a compelling portrait of youthful resilience and vulnerability, not to mention physical energy (lots of ultra-purposeful running!). Trapped in a vexing cycle of false starts and retreads after she crashes her car into a small but unyielding boulder in the Mojave Desert, her character — whose name, revealed late in the proceedings, is a winking signal of the movie’s ultimate optimism — seesaws between openness and distrust. Along the circuitous way, she encounters a few memorable figures brought to affecting life by a witchy Frances Fisher, a soulful and bereft Beau Bridges and an enigmatically shape-shifting Ryan Hurst.
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Desert Road
Cast: Kristine Froseth, Frances Fisher, Beau Bridges, Ryan Hurst, D.B. Woodside, Max Mattern, Rachel Dratch, Edwin Garcia II
Director-screenwriter: Shannon Triplett
1 hour 30 minutes
The central character is “stuck in a loop,” as she puts it in a phone conversation with her encouraging mother (Rachel Dratch). She’s talking about her stalled career dreams as a photographer, and their talk takes place while the Woman, as she’s called in the credits, waits for a tow truck. She’s on her way back to her native Iowa from Los Angeles, and her sedan holds all her earthly possessions. In a wise and loving pep talk, her mom advises against giving up — a refreshing change of pace from all those undermining movie mothers. The daughter’s response is tearful, terse and despairing. She’s defeated, and her car won’t budge. Hello, inflection point.
Her desert ordeal began with a routine stop for gas, albeit in a striking landscape. Triplett, who worked in visual effects before taking the helm of her first feature, and cinematographer Nico Navia understand that there’s no need to heighten the Mojave setting; they capture its horizontal sweep and shifting light with a directness as elegant as it is muscular, the vista heavy with emptiness and possibility. Triplett’s script refers only to Death Valley locations, but the movie also features more southerly locales, near Amboy, that are haunting even if you’ve never traversed that particular part of Southern California — and especially so if you have.
Among these is a towering and weathered sign for a long-defunct roadside restaurant, one of the ghost-town relics of Route 66’s heyday, before an interstate left it in the dust. At the isolated gas station where she stops to refuel, the Woman meets a weirdly nervous and inquisitive clerk, played to off-putting perfection by Max Mattern. It’s moments after their initial exchange that, in an instant of cellphone distraction, she has her fateful confrontation with a roadside rock and begins her wait for Steve (Hurst), apparently the only tow-truck driver for miles around. Steve says he can’t be there for hours, and he insists on prepayment over the phone.
All of which might make a seasoned driver wonder, “What, no Triple-A?” But, that reality check aside, the spell cast by Triplett’s story is so strong that potential holes in logic barely dent its surface and definitely don’t weaken its hold. (Nor does the odd way the Woman and everyone else in the movie calls the highway where the action takes place “CA-190” rather than just “190” or, in SoCal fashion, “the 190”; unless this is a clue to the puzzle that I didn’t get, it strikes a rare false note in the stripped-down dialogue.)
The ace editing and sound design are in sync with the drama’s pounding heart as Froseth’s character finds herself not just in an existential loop but in a geographical one: Again and again, no matter which way she walks along the empty two-lane straightaway, she’s back at her damaged car. Fearing she’s losing her mind, she starts jotting down notes and drawing diagrams to try to make sense of what’s happening as she moves back and forth among three landmarks — the gas station, her car and a sprawling factory behind a chain-link fence. The station’s attendant treats her more strangely each time she stops in, while a hostile motorist (Edwin Garcia II) and a factory security guard (D.B. Woodside) have no help to offer.
Like many a lone movie driver before her, the Woman has landed in a kind of purgatory, and there’s a noir pulse to the surreal world that writer-director Triplett has conjured (with aptly understated contributions by designers Matt Rumer and Nadine Sondej-Robinson). But there’s mercy too. Against the uncommon topography and the sense of terror in free fall, something vital and insistent pushes through, propelled in moments by the gentle passages in Anna Drubich’s low-key score and the glorious use of Harry Nilsson’s high-spirited “Jump Into the Fire.”
Explanations, when they arrive in such meltdown tales, can be the drama’s undoing, or at least a serious letdown. Here, though, Triplett’s space-time continuum, or dis-continuum, not only sustains its momentum in riveting fashion, but it also strikes unexpected emotional notes in the brief, sharp turns by Fisher, Bridges and Hurst. (The first two play characters best left undefined here in the interest of discovery and surprise.)
As the heart of this folding and unfolding origami of irreality, trapped in an unforgiving place and reliving moments from different angles, Froseth is magnetic every retraced step of the way. Desert Road will surely invite repeat viewings to discern its hints and untangle its logic. More than that, within its very specific subgenre, this unlikely intersection of Memento and It’s a Wonderful Life just might prove an enduring classic.
Full credits
Production companies: Firebrand Media Group, Spooky Pictures, Octopus, Filmopoly
Cast: Kristine Froseth, Frances Fisher, Beau Bridges, Ryan Hurst, D.B. Woodside, Max Mattern, Rachel Dratch, Edwin Garcia II
Director-screenwriter: Shannon Triplett
Producers: Roy Lee, Steven Schneider, Shannon Triplett, Josh Clayton, Kirk Martin, Alec Griffen Roth, Lauren Bates, Sam Cohan
Executive producers: Tuan Bui, Thinh Nguyen, Vince Jolivette, David Garrett, Angie Sanfilippo
Director of photography: Nico Navia
Production designer: Matt Rumer
Costume designer: Nadine Sondej-Robinson
Editor: Joseph Kirkland
Music: Anna Drubich
Casting: Susanna Scheel
Sound designers: Ethan Van der Ryn, Erik Aadahl, Jonathan Greasley
Sales: UTA/CAA
1 hour 30 minutes
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