The authentic story unfolds in Desert Road long before you become aware of it, an exceedingly clever and trippy chiller that manipulates survival horror conventions and takes them on a completely unexpected and ultimately very moving journey. In her directorial debut, Shannon Triplett demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of genre dynamics, with an audacious use of space (the Mojave Desert standing in for Death Valley) that becomes more gripping as the film’s enigmas unravel; at which point its edges begin to blur, shifting between horror and sci-fi in a manner reminiscent of the hypnotic mingling of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s The Endless and Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls.
The woman is Clare Devoir (Kristine Froseth), a twentysomething photographer who is giving up after too many let-downs as an LA-based struggling artist. On her way back to her mother’s house in Iowa, she pulls into a remote gas station to fill up with petrol and use the bathroom. Its pallid attendant, the Norman Bates-like Randy (Max Mattern), is twitchy, his clumsy attempts at conversation make Clare uneasy, so much so that she fabricates a boyfriend sleeping on the back seat a lie that will soon be embarrassingly exposed.
A few hundred yards down the road from the gas station, chatting to her mother on the phone, Clare receives a strange text message demanding “Call this number”. Her car appears to blow a tire, it comes to rest teetering on top of a rock at the side of the road. Dazed by shock, she is forced to walk back to the gas station and call Steve whose number she has just been told not to call the only tow truck driver in town; paying him over her cellphone in advance for his service. While waiting for him to arrive, she walks around what seems like nothing but hills with an abandoned factory.
On her return to the car, Clare discovers that her camera has been stolen. Randy denies all knowledge of it at the gas station, muttering darkly about “people that live in the desert”. A few moments later, Clare’s bank card is declined; she decides she has been scammed by Randy with elusive Steve’s complicity. Or has she been roofied with a spiked soda? Or is she simply concussed after the crash?
As Clare stalks off on foot, various theories bounce around her head setting up for a classic horror in which this urban but not terribly streetwise woman is trapped in a backwater conspiracy. Except that Clare finds herself back at the car again, and whatever direction she takes left or right, up or down she gets stuck in a loop between the car, the gas station and the factory.
The moment objective truth is left behind. Suddenly, everything changes for Clare. It becomes a dizzying matryoshka of a world a nest of parallel realities that cut forwards and backwards through time until finally we find out why Randy has been so worried this whole time. (“You’re not real!” he shouts at her in the penultimate scene. “How can you use a phone?”) While this is happening, she becomes obsessed with an old woman who lives up in the hills a ghostlike figure resembling Grandma Death from Donnie Darko, another movie about time and fate.
There’s too much going on here to process in one sitting, but surely there’s an audience out there for this compelling, Primer-like brainteaser. Triplett does some pretty fancy footwork for his first feature-length outing, and Froseth brings warmth to what could have easily become a cold, mathematical exercise in humanism.
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