It’s an almost imperceptible feeling, being truly at home. Enveloping ourselves in the familiar walls that hold our past in their marrow. For some it is a comfort, for others a kind of horror. Sometimes it’s both. Writer-director Paul Owens’ LANDLOCKED, now playing at the 2022 Chattanooga Film Festival, approaches found footage in a novel and powerfully authentic way sure to leave its mark on all who watch.
Found footage is a uniquely intimate genre at the best of times, and there’s something all the more enveloping about using your own home videos. We all remember the feeling of having our childhood memories captured in real time, saved forever on a sometimes grainy but always inviting tape for us to revisit in times of need. Having those memories on hand is part of why I can’t quite wrap my head around why people shame newer generations for their surplus photos and compulsion to document their lives. We’ve been documenting our lives for generations, in ever evolving forms. Owens’ choice to use his own home videos and miniscule cast to tell his story is, therefore, a fresh and all the more immersive approach. One part nightmare, one part heartbreaking longing for connection to the lost, LANDLOCKED excels at capturing a feeling set deep in each of our souls but near-impossible to articulate.
I am all too familiar with complicated family relationships. No one comes out of the dynamic unscathed by something, and when you lose someone, all those complex feelings float to the surface. In LANDLOCKED, three brothers are summoned to their childhood home after their father’s passing to salvage any belongings they might want before the house is demolished. Paul (Paul Owens) and Mason (Mason Owens) are the first to show up and sift through. It quickly becomes clear that Mason was the closest with his father, and soon he develops an obsession with a camera that holds—and plays—all their childhood memories. As the time of the demolition approaches, Mason wraps himself in the past in an effort to record and remember everything he can before it all comes crashing down around him.
The closest I can come to this sense of grasping for the memories in my own life came with the passing of my grandfather. My brother and I spent every summer there growing up, and the walls and space of that house are as familiar to me as my own body. So when he passed, and some of their things started to go missing, pillaged by other family members looking for something to hold onto, I began to remember and long for those pieces that had been bedrock for my childhood, now taken without notice. A book here, a dollhouse there, the pool in the backyard suddenly no longer present when my grandparents aged out of being able to use it, all taken while I was away living another season of my life, all absences to be felt when the family reconvened to celebrate him. That feeling of longing for pieces I didn’t even know I missed ran through me for the whole of the film’s 74 minutes, as did my wish that I had recorded some of the more cherished memories on my phone or a camera so they wouldn’t be ravaged and misremembered in the future by the twisting of my own mind.
LANDLOCKED dances that line of horror where our memories can wrap us in a web from which we feel like we cannot or do not want to escape, but that there may also be more beneath the surface than we are prepared to face. The ghosts we create for ourselves and plant in our own walls can be far more affecting than any other, and those are the ones floating at the fringes of Owens’ world. It feels like it was an effort of love and remembrance, the kind of thing meant to live on so audiences can reclaim and reconsider their own connections to their own pasts, made of the vulnerable lifeblood of a family that truly existed. Not quite as though you’re intruding on someone else’s past, more like they have opened a door to help you remember your own, no matter how poignant or painful it might be.
To keep calling LANDLOCKED unique and singularly special might seem like an overstatement, but in truth it is still something to be experienced. It is horror of a marrow-deep kind. Horror with love in the center of it. An incredible portrait of family dynamics and vulnerability that cannot fully be put into words. I hope that it helps you bridge the past and present of your own life. I hope it connects you. I hope it makes you feel less alone.
Tags: Chattanooga Film Festival, Chattanooga Film Festival 2022, Film Festivals, Found-Footage, Ghosts, Haunted Houses, Home Movies, Jeffrey Owens, Mason Owens, Memories, Paul Owens
No Comments