Outdoorsy
types are passionate about nature, which might be endearing, but if you ever get
lost in the woods, the survival instincts of a New Yorker will probably be more
helpful. Regrettably, Wendy has neither attribute, but she works as the
most-junior, least competent park ranger in a fictional National Park anyway.
For her, the Federal government can never shut-down too often. When she gets
lost, she gets really lost, but at least she finds a dead body to compensate in
Roxanne Benjamin’s Body at Brighton Rock,
which opens tomorrow in New York.
Nobody
has much confidence in Wendy, but she still switches her daily assignment to
something more hiking-oriented, both as a favor to her friend and to prove a
point (obviously that won’t work out so well). She could stay on her trail just
fine if she just followed the map, but she quickly contrives a way of losing
it. Suddenly, she is taking selfies on a mystery summit, much to the alarm of
her co-workers. Then she spies a corpse.
Without
an autopsy to confirm, the possibility of foul play must be considered. That
means Wendy will have to hunker down and protect the evidence until the
extraction team reaches them in the morning. Of course, it is already starting
to get cold and dark—and her skills and supplies are lacking. At this point,
Wendy’s mind starts playing sinister tricks on her—or is it? It is hard to say,
because the film plays it maddeningly coy when it comes to its genre business.
Oddly,
Brighton somewhat suffers when you
look back on it with a little distance. During the initial screening, most
genre fans will really dig Benjamin’s vintage horror vibe. It has the look and texture
of classic 1980s horror, but not the violence. Yet, with a little
consideration, it is hard to have much patience with a film so fundamentally
predicated on irresponsible behavior.
More
problematically, Benjamin never settle into any particular genre, nor does she
even flirt with any for very long. That all leads to a resigned “so, that was
that” summary reaction when it is all over. Brighton
is no Trouble with Harry or Weekend at Bernie’s, but it is less
annoying than Swiss Army Man, to place
it on the spectrum of movies in which corpses play a substantial role. On the
other hand, it is still definitely more “horror” or “thriller” than Backcountry, which was packaged as a
midnight movie, but was really just about a lost couple trying not to antagonize
a rather territorial bear.
Be
all that as it may, Karina Fontes is totally committed as Wendy and Casey Adams
nicely destabilizes the proceedings as the mystery man who periodically turns
up. In her feature directorial debut, Benjamin does not quite live up to the
promise of her contributions to the anthology film Southbound, but she shows enough stylistic flair to have us ready
to check out her next film. However, Body
at Brighton Rock is the film we have now and it earns a decidedly mixed
notice when it opens tomorrow (4/26) in New York, at the IFC Center.
