GAZER – Review by Beth Accomando
Right now all eyes are on Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a big studio film with an indie heart. But in the shadow of this mainstream release is another film worthy of your attention, an $80,000 indie gem called Gazer.
Gazer opens with a voice telling us and the main character to “Focus.” Then the voice asks, “What do you see?” That’s a fun and clever way to open a film and essentially demand the audience leave the buzz and bustle of the world behind and pay attention to the story unfolding on the screen.
Frankie (Ariella Mastroianni) is the young woman we meet in the opening. As she listens to an audio tape she gazes out into the world like a voyeur. But she’s oblivious to the task immediately in front of her at the gas station where she works. Her inability to focus on her job gets her fired.
Frankie returns home to a tiny and sparse apartment. We soon discover that Frankie makes the audio cassettes she listens to as a means of coping with a rare degenerative brain condition that affects her ability to perceive time and can cause sudden blackouts. She needs to reduce all outside stimuli so she has no cell phone or computer or screens of any kind. She tries to move through the world unseen but one night she witnesses something in an apartment window and then crosses paths with a mysterious woman.
Later the woman shows up at a grief group therapy session and Frankie decides to open up to her, telling her about her daughter and her need to save money. This leads to Frankie accepting a risky but high paying job from the woman. But of course, things go horribly wrong. Frankie blacks out, a dead body shows up, and the cops pull her in for questioning.
Co-written by actress Mastroianni and director Ryan J. Sloan, Gazer serves up everything you expect from a classic neo noir: a murder, a mysterious woman, a possible conspiracy, and most beguilingly, an unreliable narrator. We see things from Frankie’s perspective but then she blacks out and can’t remember anything. We discover things from her past, including the violent death of her husband, but we don’t know exactly what happened because Frankie seems uncertain of the details. And that uncertainty haunts her and results in some pretty trippy nightmares filled with the kind of body horror we expect from David Lynch or David Cronenberg.
Gazer is a slow burn in the best sense of the term. We’re sucked into a spiraling story steeped in paranoia and unfolding in bits and pieces that we have to put together.
Mastroianni and Sloan began the project during the pandemic, then shot on nights and weekends over two years on a miniscule budget. But the result is impressive. Sloan shot on film and the visual style recalls the paranoid neo noirs of the 1970s like The Conversation or Cutter’s Way. And Frankie’s audio tapes feel like an affectionate riff on the voice over narrations of classic noir where Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe guided us through all the twists and turns of the complex plots. Frankie may not be on par with Spade or Marlowe but she proves to be far more dogged than we expect.
As played by Mastroianni, Frankie has tightly cropped black hair with haunted eyes and a slight physique. Her mental and physical state make her seem fragile but she’s surprisingly tough or at least unwilling to give up.
Since her world is so insular, Sloan uses sound and music to good effect. The outside world and its noise often feel muffled since Frankie usually wears headphones. The audio style helps to create a certain claustrophobia and a sense of events closing in on Frankie.
I love that Gazer is a film I stumbled upon before knowing anything about it. I walked in with no expectations and walked out feeling rewarded. Sloan and Mastroianni were actually at the screening I saw and they spoke with such great love and passion that made the experience all the better.
Gazer does not have the backing of a big studio or an expensive promotional campaign. It’s also a film that hard to peg or fit into a neat category. All those things conspire to keep it hidden, but hopefully it will find an audience.
