Shared Darkness

A fairly clever little indie film that shrewdly marries the popular but well-worn “found footage” framing device to a prurient storyline, the NC-17-rated Lucky Bastard may not win any awards, but it puts an imaginative spin on what is too often a sloppy low-budget aesthetic, easily outstripping charges of empty gimmickry.



After an opening consisting of crime scene footage that tips viewers off to some dark events, the rest of the film is presented as the behind-the-scenes footage from a porn shoot for a website called “Lucky Bastard,” where each month a member fan is chosen to have sex with an adult film star. The starlet in this case is Ashley Saint (Betsy Rue), a single mother who reluctantly agrees to the scenario only after much cajoling (and an increased payday) by producer-director Mike (Don McManus). After viewing a couple submission videos, Ashley and Mike agree on a winner — sad-sack Dave (Jay Paulson, above left), who looks like he could be a cousin of Kenneth Parcell from 30 Rock. The crew pick up Dave and head over to a rented house but when Dave calls Ashley by her real name it freaks her out, and she wants to call things off. She eventually relents, but more problems pop up.

Director Robert Nathan, working from a script co-written with Lukas Kendall, colors and shades his film in a nice way, as well as mixing in other smaller characters — including an uptight real estate agent and a male porn star called in on short notice when things with Dave prove to be difficult. Lucky Bastard doesn’t suffer the same sense of narrative suffocation that so many other found footage films do — wherein the framing device is used as a crutch of convenience to absolve its creators from having to do the heavy lifting of character development. Nathan is a television veteran of both Law & Order and ER, and his experience with tightly structured acts is on ample display.

The film’s conceit, of course, rather cleverly masks the shortfall in production value when stacked up against a typical independent movie, though there is above-average consideration given to framing and shot selection — abetted by the aforementioned production house, outfitted with cameras.

Likewise, the acting mostly can’t, or at least shouldn’t, be judged in traditional dramatic metrics, but rather by how believably these actors inhabit a series of postures knowing full well that cameras are on them. When events later go sideways things change, but it’s a fairly difficult juggling act that for the most part the cast excels at. Especially good in this regard is McManus.

Its subject matter alone dictates that it won’t be for some audiences but perhaps the highest compliment one can pay Lucky Bastard is to say that it’s effective and also quite believable for the story it chooses to tell — well sketched out, and sincere in its characters’ motivations. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Rated NC-17, Lucky Bastard opens this Friday in Los Angeles at the Vintage Cinemas’ Los Feliz 3. For more information on the film, meanwhile, click here to visit its website. (Vineyard Haven Productions, NC-17, 94 minutes)

Supernaturally tinged Norwegian mystery-horror import Thale unfolds, on a narrative level, like some weird hybrid of Sunshine Cleaning, Splice and Lady in the Water — a work that dances around a couple moods and genres without ever really wholeheartedly committing to one in particular. Telling the story of a surprise woodland contact between a pair of guys and an awakened, captive huldra — a nymph-like creature of Scandinavian folklore — writer-director Aleksander Nordaas’ work gives off a certain eerie vibe that, along with its regional specificity, add up to give the movie something of a pungent originality. But Thale is ultimately all wind-up, failing to take its characters to more interesting places.



The unflappable Leo (Jon Sigve Skard) heads up “No Shit Cleaning Service,” a crime scene scrubbing company. Perhaps against better judgment, he’s thrown a bit of work to his friend Elvis (Erlend Norvold), with vomitous consequences. Tasked with finding the scattered remains of an old man at a cabin in the woods, Leo and Elvis instead discover a most unusual mute girl (Silje Reinåmo, above) and a bunch of audio tapes in which said man can be heard talking about the girl’s highly adaptive nature, and how she’s “different than” her sisters. As Elvis starts to seemingly become able to bridge the communication gap they also make a rather shocking discovery in a freezer, leading them to question just how dangerous this girl might be.

If there’s a nice fog of intrigue that surrounds Thale for a good long while, there’s also an imperturbability to the entire movie, which kind of dawdles and drags. For a long time Thale isn’t really a horror movie, even in any Gothic sense, but instead just a mystery about this girl’s origins, and how she’s survived seemingly on her own for an indeterminate length of time. This works, but only up to a point. At around the 45-minute mark, there’s a nice conversation between Leo and Elvis in which some of their vulnerabilities are stripped bare, and for a moment it looks as if Thale is going to dive headlong into a story of fraternal drift, with its mysterious title waif serving only as a joint kickstarter and metaphorical connection for the two.

At a certain point, the movie’s slow-peddled nature either becomes wholly mesmeric or a bit of a put-on. For me it was the latter — it felt like a lot of artful dodging in service of a story that wasn’t really fully fleshed out, or at least not taken in interesting directions. Thale doesn’t really delve substantively into mythology — its characters aren’t scientists, admittedly — so when others come looking for the same-named girl, plunging Leo and Elvis into a greater danger, it feels like a leap into tension unearned, nipped from some screenwriting manual.

Serving as his own cinematographer, camera operator and editor, Nordaas delivers an enigmatic aria in many respects. A director like Brad Anderson would be able to turn this into a work of suffocating anxiety, though. As is, Thale is a movie that’s less than the sum of its parts — interesting around the edges, but not fully developed, and lacking any sort of revelatory punch. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Thale screens in theaters this week in Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Denver and Portland — check your local listings, as they say — and then arrives on home video and VOD later in the month, on April 23. (XLrator Media, R, 77 minutes)