GAZER Review: Atmospheric Neo-Noir Crumbles Under Its Own Style

Frankie (Ariella Mastroianni) is already having a rough night, having just been fired from her gas station job, when it gets even more complicated as she starts to believe that she witnessed an act of violence.

"Believe" is an operative word here. Frankie’s perception of reality makes her an unreliable narrator because she has a neurological condition called dyschronometria. To make sense of the surrounding world, Frankie dictates endless tapes for herself about her everyday experiences, and even she admits that what she thinks was her witnessing a guy hitting a woman might have been something different.

Frankie’s suspicions are somewhat confirmed when the woman in question, Claire (Renee Gagner), appears in her support group for suicide survivors. Claire also comes up with an offer that is too good to be true.

All Frankie has to do is pick up some stuff from Claire’s apartment and move it from one point to another, and she is promised $3,000 in return. Even though Frankie realizes that the deal might be shady, she still agrees because of the whole separate subplot involving her young daughter, who temporarily lives with Frankie’s mother-in-law.

Gazer, an independent neo-noir directed by Ryan J. Sloan, can be fully described through the concept of artistic mashups and various references. It’s Blow-Up meets Memento. The Conversation meets Body Double. Profondo rosso meets The Woman in the Window.

All of the above concepts are obviously great, by themselves and combined. They just don’t leave much opportunity for the authors of this particular film to say anything new. The major themes of Sloan’s film — our perception of reality, the complicated nature of memory, and the human tendency for voyeurism as an instrument of making sense of the world — have already been done many times over. Gazer doesn’t really add anything to this conversation, apart from looking really pretty.

Shot on 16 mm, Gazer features wonderfully grainy imagery and subdued colors, effectively establishing a reality that feels both disorienting and overtly hostile. However, this eerie aesthetic alone isn’t sufficient to keep the story engaging for two hours.

The jazz that fills the background, along with Frankie’s offscreen musings, highlights the fact that the reality presented here is more stylized and less heartfelt. Ariella Mastroianni, playing Frankie, is a powerhouse who carries a lot of weight here. Not only did her role as co-author of the script contribute to the character feeling more authentic, but she is also so genuinely photogenic that you can’t help but want to watch her do just about anything.

That said, even that effect has its natural limitations, and at some point, the narrative starts to crumble under the weight of the authors’ ambitions. It’s one of those stories that are both overcomplicated and obvious at its core, where so much and so little happens simultaneously.

This tendency becomes glaringly apparent when the storyline about Frankie’s husband’s death seeps into the general narrative. While not serving any particular purpose, it seems to exist solely to provide us with prolonged dream sequences, which, for some reason, draw heavily from David Cronenberg’s body of work and don't correspond with anything else in the film.

According to the authors, this film, which was produced entirely independently and had the good fortune of being included in the Cannes Un Certain Regard section last year, took a significant financial and emotional toll on them. Knowing that fact and realizing the filmmakers’ ambitions behind this debut makes it hard to be critical of it — it’s one of those films you want to like, even if you actually don’t.

The authors of Gazer clearly have great taste in movies and genuinely love everything they pay homage to here. However, despite what the excessively optimistic ending of the film seems to imply, sometimes love is simply not enough.

The film opens today in select theaters via Metrograph Pictures.