Shared Darkness

Several years ago, in 2011, multi-hyphenate director Evan Glodell and a group of collaborators with whom he shared a long list of short-form collaborations made a weird little film, saturated in feverish tones, called Bellflower. Whatever one thought of that movie itself as a finished narrative product, its construction was so audacious and of a piece as to almost take one’s breath away. The Signal, directed by Will Eubank, is an extraordinarily different work, but one every bit as charged and shot through with cool assurance and technical savvy. It’s the type of indie offering that cuts right through all the noise and clutter, signaling the arrival of undeniable new talents.



Co-written by director Eubank, his brother Carlyle Eubank and David Frigerio, The Signal, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, unfolds in confident shorthand strokes, its characterizations winnowed down to spare essences. It starts off as a road trip movie. Nic Eastman (Brenton Thwaites), his girlfriend Haley Peterson (Olivia Cooke) and his friend and fellow MIT student Jonah Breck (Beau Knapp) are heading west when they decide upon a detour. A mysterious hacker known only as “NOMAD” has been messing with Nic and Jonah, and when they’re able to pinpoint his location, they decide to pay an unscheduled visit. Their directions lead them to an isolated area, however. Suddenly, there’s a flash.

When Nic regains consciousness, he finds himself trapped in a waking nightmare. He’s groggy and injured, and sealed off to boot from Haley and Jonah. A doctor in a hazmat suit, Wallace Damon (Laurence Fishburne), keeps Nic in isolation, informing him that he believes he may have come into contact with aliens. Eventually Nic escapes his enclosed compound, but encounters a number of strangers (including Lin Shaye) who force him to further re-evaluate his impressions of his situation.

The Signal is nominally a science-fiction-rooted thriller, but it’s powered by mystery more than incident, and dread more than horror. In this this regard, the first act especially is rapturous. The film as a whole is beautiful, though — an experiential treat. Eubank has a previous directorial credit under his belt (the little-seen Love), but has also served as a second unit director and cinematographer on a variety of features. Collaborating here with cinematographer David Lanzenberg, Eubank delivers a movie with a visual template that is alluring and hypnotic — the cinematic equivalent of a lonely drive down a dark desert highway. Composer Nima Fakhrara assists this evocation of mood with a score — a slow piano leitmotif which incorporates droning elements — that connotes a kind of high-brow menace.

That the film’s narrative eventually paints itself into a bit of a corner is perhaps somewhat expected. It’s here, too, where the representational tack of the movie’s first act comes back to bite it in the rear end just a little. While the performances herein are uniformly great, the plot separates Nic, Haley and Jonah, and when the story brings them back together it feels like too much time has passed. A stronger channeling of subjective point-of-view or, conversely, a slightly more conventionally structured narrative of investigation that keeps our frazzled trio together would have rooted The Signal, and afforded it more emotional punching power.

Still, the dark, involving swirl of this thought-provoking low-budget effort — a blend of Moon, The Blair Witch Project, THX-1138 and Chronicle, among other titles — doesn’t let go of a viewer easily. Even if there are some hiccups in its wind-down, there’s nowhere else one would rather be while watching it. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Focus, PG-13, 97 minutes)

A stirring nonfiction sociocultural curiosity that taps into the power of sports to bridge divides and develop kinships across incredible distances, director Mirra Bank’s The Only Real Game tells the story of a small pocket of India obsessed with baseball. Narrated by Academy Award winner Melissa Leo, the film is an involving reminder of the fact that ambassadorships need not be political, and that human understanding and connection turns on a much more intimate axis.



The Only Real Game takes place in Manipur, a remote eastern Indian bordering Burma, beset with 25 percent unemployment plus many other problems — not the least of which is violence which has racked the area since a forced territorial merging post-World War II. Nationalist police, under threat of insurgent attack, operate with impunity, often beating and bullying residents indiscriminately. Caught in the middle are normal residents, who have lived under martial law for decades.

In the land of cricket and soccer, baseball arrived on the wings of war, and quickly found a welcome home. American airmen stationed in Manipur after the Japanese bombing of the region in 1942 would stage games on their bases, which were staffed with locals. Baseball caught on — the seeds planted for future generations of fans. (“It means more to me than having a husband,” says one of the many area women obsessed with the game.) With Muriel Peters’ First Pitch non-profit organization spearheading a charity effort, manufacturer Spalding donates a bunch of equipment and Major League Baseball dispatches two special envoys, Dave Palese and Jeff Brueggemann, to head up clinics and help instruct Manipurian coaches and players alike.

Editorially (if somewhat understandably), the film gets tangled up just a bit in the thicket of history and politics. But Bank is quite smart when it comes to interweaving the stories of the American coaches and their Indian counterparts, striking an easy, engaging balance. And she also finds a nice parallel to the stalled or blocked dreams of several native subjects in the story of Brueggemann’s promising pitching career, derailed by a summer job taken out of economic necessity.

As sad as its surrounding reality is, The Only Real Game has the good sense to still locate and indulge a playful and occasionally dark sense of humor. When Brueggemann and several of his cohorts take a trip into a rebel-controlled area to look at habitats that an architect wants to incorporate into the construction of a proper baseball field and complex, a uniformed military officer says, “This area is very calm — a very calm place,” even as a soldier walks by with a shoulder-mounted bazooka.

In an ending admirably devoid of pat, artificial uplift, there’s no way of knowing whether this simple act of outreach and baseball instruction will help bring the community of Manipur jobs, and/or a measure of peace. But The Only Real Game reminds viewers of the power of shared passions, and the ability of so-called trivialities like sports and the arts to transcend borders and false adversarial designations. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. The Only Real Game opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall. For information about other screenings and more information on the film in general, click here to visit the movie’s website. (The Only Real Game Movie LLC, unrated, 82 minutes)