FrightFest review – A Desert

A Desert (2024)

Joshua Erkman’s A Desert, which he co-wrote with Bossi Baker, is – among other things – a tour of derelict, almost post-human locations in the American South-West which functions very much like the picture book photographer Alex Clark (Kai Lennox) is working on.  It’s also a melding of Psycho and the oeuvre of David Lynch, but not in the expected ways – no shower scene homage, no ‘mother isn’t herself’, no Wizard of Oz references, no repurposed jukebox classics.  Nevertheless, familiar types pop up in made-over versions … a motel clerk who is nothing but sinister (William Bookston, who looks like Richard Brake after being dragged over fifty miles of bad road), a dogged private eye who roams the desert in a shabby suit (David Yow), a demonic redneck pimp who sometimes seems attuned to UFOs or to share characteristics with vampires (Zachary Ray Sherman), a trashy sex worker who is slyer than she seems (Ashley Smith), and a guy surrounded by monitors who might be directing a new form of pornography (Rob Zabrecky) in an abandoned theatre on an abandoned military base.

On the road, Alex has a long leash from his slightly fed-up wife Sam (Sarah Lind) — whom he calls regularly – but makes the elementary mistake of complaining about the noise of a fight in the next room, which brings Renny (Sherman) knocking at his door with a bottle of firewater and a request that he photograph his ‘sister’ Susie Q (Smith).  After that, a blackout is almost inevitable … then a trip into the desert to find several natural and unnatural locales and start to join the symbolic dots Erkman has littered through the film (repeated references to ‘diamond’, strews of dead tech, now-retro-style elements like getting off on casual cruelty inflicted on tied-to-a-chair folk and the demonising of the rural poor).  A disappearance prompts Sam (John Gavin’s character name in Psycho) and the PI Harold Palladino (Yow, who might as well wear an IheartMartinBalsam button) to trace Alex’s steps into the edges of civilisation and the wastes beyond.  And things skew away from normal reality and narrative, with compensations in the gorgeous desertscapes and tours of ruined, abandoned habitations already half-surrendered to nature.