Gazer

Independent Film Festival Boston takes the Somerville Theatre over starting on Wednesday, so not much is opening there since it would just get moved around anyway, but it does mean that they had a little room on screen #2 for this to get a brief five-day run, while the other screen downstairs is playing Secret Mall Apartment. They had filmmakers and subjects for the opening last week, so you'll find these throughout the theater:

If you've seen the movie, you get it.

(There was also a plastic easter egg in my seat's cupholder, because it was Easter, and now I'm wondering if there was a free ticket or something inside)

Anyway, it's serendipitous that Secret Mall Apartment was last year's IFFBoston spotlight film at the Somerville, and its regular run is at that theater just as the next year's festival opens.

So, obviously, late post, but last call for Gazer is tonight at 7pm, but Secret Mall Apartment will be back next Wednesday, at least for a couple of days.


Gazer

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2025 in Somerville Theatre #2 (first-run, DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I'm not saying Gazer would have been better if this was the case, but I went into the film thinking it was going to be a scrappy little 74-minute indie only for it to be half-again that long. It doesn't quite fall into the "you're probably only going to get one movie about X, so put every X thing you can imagine into it" trap (with X being dyschronometria in this case), but it does wind up spreading both its hook and its plot kind of thin.

Frankie Rhodes (Ariella Mastroianni) is the person with dyschronometria here; for her, it tends to present as zoning out, not realizing that a time has passed, but also interacts with a number of other cerebral issues, which together are likely terminal. Her doctor has advised her to look into an assisted living facility, but she bristles, wanting to be reunited with daughter Cynthia, who has been in the custody of her mother-in-law Diane (Marianne Goodell) since Frankie's husband Roger's suicide (Diane thinks Frankie's claims she was zoned out and unable to remember is awful convenient). At a support group, she meets Paige Foster (Renee Gagner), whose brother Henry (Jack Alberts) has become abusive since their mother's suicide. Paige offers to pay $3000 if Frankie will sneak into the apartment, get her car keys, and drive it to someplace she can pick it up, but when Paige doesn't show up at the meeting the next day, Frankie doesn't know whether something has happened to her or if, rather than another woman in a tough situation, Paige had seen her as a perfect patsy.

Despite being set in roughly the present day, the vibe of Gazer comes from a generation or two earlier; director Ryan J. Sloan and cinematographer Matheus Bastos shoot on 16mm film and find the sorts of locations in Newark, New Jersey that haven't changed much in the last three or four decades. Everyone has cars that have been on the road for a while, and, crucially, Frankie relies on payphones and a cassette player in her daily life; LED screens and the like tend to trigger her illnesses in a bad way. The score by Steve Matthew Carter isn't exactly a throwback but wouldn't seem out of place in a paranoid 1970s thriller. Little bits of modernity appear around the edges - the PC showing brain scans in the doctor's office, the way Frankie uses earbuds rather than clunky headphones - but the effect is just enough to keep the audience from asking questions and maybe put them in a similar state of detachment.

It's a good sort of mental space for this kind of mystery. The story is not particularly complicated, perhaps, but it's interesting enough to have something to tug on while observing everything else in Frankie's life. Star Ariella Mastroianni (who co-wrote the film with husband Sloan) is careful never to present Frankie as a sleuth, even as she is following a trail or evading pursuit, but someone locked into the current moment who has to work hard to manage anything outside it. There's something off about the way she plays against everyone else in the movie, like Frankie isn't really sure how well she knows anybody aside from her daughter. As much as Frankie is mostly-functional and the more relatable pieces get across, one kind of has to learn to read her, though Masroianni seems to have figured out a nonstandard but consistent set of expressions and tones.

One could argue that the way the pacing and priorities get weird in the last stretch is part of the point; is giving the audience a sense of the disorientation and distraction Frankie feels as he stretches the time out after all the pieces have been put together and has Frankie sort of stumbling forward while often having surreal flashbacks to the night her husband dies. There's not much connection, which frustrates the audience who expects movies to edit in a way that creates links but also perhaps underlines how Frankie is constantly both in the now and the then. A lot of the second half of the movie is like that, though, with Cronenbergian imagery that doesn't exactly resonate with the idea that Frankie's main issue is keeping track of time, and a finale that may be frustratingly discordant in how it emphasizes that Frankie's priority is not necessarily the mystery that has been occupying the audience's more conventional brains.

It's a reasonably intriguing paradox of a movie, in that everything that helps the audience get into Frankie's head and mindset also makes the movie more frustrating as a mystery and story, but it's possible that the filmmakers are well aware of that: What are the cassette tapes that Frankie uses to keep her focused and aware of, say, how long she should be riding on the bus to get home but a way to impose a narrative on her frustratingly nonlinear mind, and how is someone more likely to spiral rather than regroup when those crutches fail? It's a movie that many will leave frustrated, but, well, imagine how Frankie must feel!