{"id":387159,"date":"2025-11-18T08:29:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T08:29:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/387159\/"},"modified":"2025-11-18T08:29:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T08:29:11","slug":"a-desert-review-high-art-meets-trailer-trash-in-americana-aesthetics-horror-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/387159\/","title":{"rendered":"A Desert review \u2013 high art meets trailer trash in Americana-aesthetics horror | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Director Joshua Erkman\u2019s feature debut manages to deliver an impressively creepy horror exercise that\u2019s also a bit of a send-up of horror conventions. At the same time, it feels like a weird dodge into borderline-abstraction and unknowable mystery that drains all the realism away, making this a mannered film-making exercise. But there\u2019s no denying the level of craft on show, or the original way Erkman throws together practitioners of highfalutin art-world discourse and skeevy low-lifes, with bloody results. In generic terms, it definitely feels of a piece with other recent highbrow-meets-lowbrow scare-\u2019em-ups, the kind of grad-school horror you might see in the queer-eyed I Saw the TV Glow<\/a>, David Lowery\u2019s stripped-down A Ghost Story,<\/a> or director Ari Aster\u2019s Hereditary<\/a>. In other words: interesting for sure, but perhaps a bit pretentious for hardcore gorehounds.<\/p>\n

In A Desert, we first meet photographer Alex (Kai Lennox) as he drives around the desiccated terrain of California\u2019s Yucca Valley<\/a>, listening to smooth contemporary jazz on his fancy SUV\u2019s sound system and pulling over to take pictures of abandoned buildings. He shoots his images on a fancy 8×10 inch apparatus that uses photographic plates that need to be exposed for 10 second intervals. His subjects include disused cinemas and the ghost town remains of abandoned military bases \u2013 although in a voicemail he leaves for his wife Sam (Sarah Lind) he suggests he might shift over into portraits for a while. Clearly, he\u2019s not especially interested in the people who live here, although when the trailer-trash-style couple (Zachary Ray Sherman and Ashley Smith) in the motel room next door come a-knocking, offering turpentine-tasting hooch and a chance to party, Alex is too polite\/weak to resist.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Not long after a blur of lapdance moves and lurid colours, all set to EDM, the film creates a caesura much like another well-known horror film that to name would spoil the main twist. Suffice it to say, after that things roll on and we follow different protagonists, this time Alex\u2019s wife Sam and private detective Harold (David Yow) who find themselves drifting down the same lost highways of the valley.<\/p>\n

Erkman, a sometime cinematographer himself, and director of photography Jay Keitel really nail the artbook view of the economically depressed west, a style that\u2019s like the Americana of Joel Meyerowitz<\/a> meeting the ruination porn of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre<\/a>. We are no doubt meant to infer that Alex and other visitors only see the exploitable aesthetics of area, photogenically surrendering to the forces of nature, and are blind to the real human evil that exists there \u2013 out in plain sight as the last shot confirms. It\u2019s perhaps not a very profound message, but the visual and editing styles are swoony and most bewitching.<\/p>\n

A Desert is on digital platforms from 24 November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Director Joshua Erkman\u2019s feature debut manages to deliver an impressively creepy horror exercise that\u2019s also a bit of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":387160,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,53,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-387159","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115569764994672980","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/387160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}