SXSW 2024 Review: DESERT ROAD, A Woman Navigates Her Way Through Despair In This Sci-Fi Gem
An intentionally convoluted science-fiction fantasy film about despair and recovery, first time feature filmmaker Shannon Triplett’s Desert Road is just the kind of small film with big ideas that really resonates with the festival crowd. Powered by an impressive lead performance from Kristine Froseth, who spends much of the film on her own, Desert Road explores the confusion and traps of uncertainty that weigh us down, while also attempting to point out the light at the end of the tunnel that represents acceptance.
When a woman (Froseth) has a car accident driving down a lonely desert road, it sparks an adventure through time when no matter which direction she strikes out in, she finds herself back at her disabled car. Eternally stuck between a remote factory and an ever-changing gas station, the unnamed protagonist must no figure out if there’s any way out or if she’s trapped in this loop forever.
Director Triplett has an extensive filmmaking background, but for the most part it has centered around the VFX end of the technical spectrum. Having worked on films like Battleship, Godzilla (2014), and Fast Five in that capacity, one could be forgiven for expecting a similarly pitched sci-fi film with Desert Road. Thankfully for us, Triplett takes it back to basics, delivering a high concept that lets the writing tell the story, rather than overwhelming the audience with a bunch of whiz-bang pixels dancing around the screen.
The woman’s journey is a solitary one. Apart from a couple of characters who pop up to help the audience identify her current temporal location, it’s up to Froseth to make sure this movie works. As a woman at first confused, then frustrated, then determined, and finally resolved to escape the trap in which she finds herself, Froseth acquits herself brilliantly. Her encounters with the gas station attendant (Max Mattern) providing both context for her confusion as well as occasional comic relief, and some high profile extended cameos to help make plain the consequences of her success or failure to complete her task, all hinge on Froseth’s ability to sell us the pain.
Desert Road marks the latest in a series of handmade science fiction features over the last five years, with several such films (Artifice Girl, Molli and Max in the Future, and 2020 selection Cargo) featuring at SXSW. It’s a genre that doesn’t get the kind of love that it should precisely because the budgets are small, but the ideas couldn’t be more relatable.
Triplett’s puzzle box of a script unfolds naturally as both The Woman and the audience are beginning to wonder exactly what the point of it all is. While there’s an inkling that there is a meaning, the film doesn’t bash you over the head with it, rather it lets us discover as The Woman does, putting us on this journey with her. It’s a complex web of movement that Triplett could very easily have decided to put us in the weeds with the internal logic, but rather than asking the audience to diagram the plot, Desert Road assures us that we’re in good hands by giving the character the intelligence to decode it for us.
Hopelessness and loss are complex emotions that are by no means untrodden ground in storytelling, but Desert Road does something very different here, and that’s commendable. Rarely has the experience of finding a path through the miasma of doubt been so cleverly treated in a way that is both innovative and intuitive to understand. Desert Road should be on every watch list for the rest of the year, it’s not the kind of film that generally gets tongues wagging, but it should be, because big ideas in small films deserve love too, especially when they are this good.
