Frankie, the roaming, cogitating mystery woman at the center of the cryptic drama “Gazer,” has eyes as big as hubcaps and a strange charisma. Much of her appeal stems from the striking looker who plays her, Ariella Mastroianni, who wrote the script with the director, Ryan J. Sloan. Although indebted to its influences to the point of self-sabotage, the movie manages to surmount enough of its flaws — including some shaky acting and distracting awkwardness — to hold your own gaze, more or less. Like Frankie, who watches others with visceral intensity, you keep looking as you wait on events, wonder and wait some more.
A solitary, unsettled soul, Frankie lives in a spartan apartment in modern-day Newark that she seems to have sublet from one of Paul Schrader’s existential loners. Like those characters who brood throughout his “man in a room” trilogy (“First Reformed,” “The Card Counter,” “Master Gardener”), Frankie doesn’t always communicate easily with other people. Instead, much of the story emerges from her on-and-off voice-over and from cassette-tape recordings that effectively function as critical mental aids (shades of Christopher Nolan’s “Memento”), prompts she uses to try and keep her mind and world ordered. It’s a continual struggle.
It’s also a struggle without an apparent happy ending because many of Frankie’s problems seem to stem from dyschronometria, an incurable condition that wreaks havoc with her sense of time. This malady has profoundly isolated her, and is getting worse; in one early scene, a doctor suggests that she check into a facility that cares for “patients with cognitive impairment,” as he puts it. Frankie demurs. She’s trying to save money for her young daughter who lives with someone else, a goal that leads to a series of complications that push the movie into self-conscious noirish territory with varied results. There, as the shadows darken, she meets another question mark, Claire (Renee Gagner), who offers to help her.
Things grow progressively complicated, sometimes intriguingly so, especially when the story is fuzzier. In its first stretch, Sloan and Mastroianni build a palpable air of dank menace by creating tension with narrative ellipses and leaning into Frankie’s unusual condition and her isolation. Frankie doesn’t just live alone, she also seems OK with being estranged from most of her family and whatever friends she may have had. An early, foreboding sequence of her warily walking into a house to shrieking electronic music adds more mystery and intrigue, particularly when her creeping entrance is abruptly interrupted by the appearance of a gun.
The picture grows alternately clearer and murkier, more intriguing and frustrating, as it continues. Claire proposes to pay Frankie several thousand for far-fetched reasons: Claire wants to run away from her brother, who she claims abuses her, and wants Frankie to steal some car keys from his apartment. Deals like this rarely turn out well under suspicious circumstances, especially when strangers give as much side-eye as Claire does and make offers that shrewder protagonists would refuse. Frankie, being desperate for money and a convenient risk-taker, unsurprisingly accepts the offer. Here, trouble is everyone’s business.
Sloan has clearly watched a lot of movies and cribs from them freely, which is fine when the story carves a path through familiar genre ground. Part of the movie’s enjoyment comes from how the filmmakers take Schrader’s lonely men, for one, and bend his signature type to different ends. It helps, too, that Mastroianni is a naturally attractive screen presence. Her pale face, vividly offset by short dark hair, beams in the gloom, and she suggests much even when Frankie goes silent. It’s too bad then that the movie finally goes off the rails, including with some Cronenbergian flourishes out of “Videodrome”; there’s an amusing, low-fi thriller here amid what prove to be too many twists and thickets of cinematic allusion.
Gazer
Rated R for bloody violence and peril. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times. More about Manohla Dargis
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