THE OUTWATERS, writer/ director/ cinematographer Robbie Banfitch’s visionary found footage first feature, is a tough act to follow, but his sophomore feature TINSMAN ROAD (which premiered at the Unnamed Footage Festival Vol. 8 in San Francisco) ups a different kind of ante. THE OUTWATERS shreds the fabric of reality on an almost unimaginable scale – a brutal, deafening concerto destabilizing time, space, and self. TINSMAN ROAD, on the other hand, is a deeply intimate sonata of uncanny dread. This is a wound you pick at in the family room until it leads you to the woods. It’s the burning in your chest when you hear your mother crying through a wall. Viewers who can appreciate the emotional gut punch of a stunningly crafted, intimate slow-burn will not be disappointed. The less you know going in, the better, so I’ll be oblique and speak in feelings.
Robbie Lyle (Robbie Banfitch) hasn’t been able to face his mother since his sister (Noelle Faccone)’s disappearance from a woods-lined street not far from his New Jersey childhood home. His mother (played by his actual mother Leslie Ann Banfitch) has stewed alone in the house for three years, now believing herself to be surrounded by signs and angels, perhaps the presence of her lost daughter. Robbie and his miniDV camera are investigating his sister’s disappearance under the auspice of a documentary about his mother’s newfound obsession with angelic presences.
“What do you want?” Robbie asks his mother.
“I want everything to be the way it was.”
The unhomeliest house is the childhood home we no longer recognize. In “The Uncanny,” Freud explores the slippery ambiguity between the “homely” (heimlich, familiar) and “unhomely” (unheimlich, unfamiliar). The space of the uncanny is the uneasy collapse of the familiar and unfamiliar, the emergence or recognition of things meant to stay repressed or hidden.
TINSMAN ROAD is a long stretch of family wounds kept warm in the oven. It’s a meditation on intimate pain held together by the push and pull of presence and absence, of expression and repression. In the Lyle family home, pain bursts through the cracks – try as Robbie’s mother might to seal them with the dough of family recipes and insistence on rote motions of holiday traditions.
In TINSMAN ROAD, ghosts are spinning memories orbiting presence. They live in hand-decorated cassette tapes unspooling traces of memory into the dark of Robbie’s childhood bedroom. They live in the peeling red paint on a music box ballerina’s shoe as it exhales Swan Lake into the dark of Noelle’s empty room downstairs. They’re frozen in old photos and home movies. They’re the comfort of the scab beneath your fingertips before you peel it off — rough, yours, anticipating the bright wet hurt underneath. Maybe there are signs after all.
As with any indie found footage feature, the quality of the performances is everything. Low budget means nowhere to hide. In TINSMAN ROAD, everyone in this exceptional cast delivers stunning naturalism for full immersion. Leslie Ann Banfitch in particular conveys uncomfortable levels of emotional realism, and Robbie Banfitch gives as nuanced and committed a performance as we’ve come to expect from him.
Banfitch’s Malick-inspired eye brings us beautifully composed cinematography that is such a treat in the often strictly utilitarian found footage genre. Nature is a constant presence, and we are grounded in place by focus on the weather and the changing of the seasons: clouds dripping past the moon, skeletal tree branches piercing the sky, torrents of rain and soft drifts of snow. The woods become oppressive.
Immaculate editing and dynamite sound design (including original music by Salem Belladonna, used to great effect) contribute to the film’s exceptional immersive quality, increasing viewers’ affective investment in the characters and building dread towards all-consuming terror. Robbie’s mother’s choked sobs give way to rain weeping over window panes, which give way to water rinsing dishes in the sink. It’s Thanksgiving. The turkey’s heart is ground up in the stuffing. That’s the secret to love.
Tags: Film Festivals, Found-Footage, Leslie Ann Banfitch, Noelle Faccone, Robbie Banfitch, Salem Belladonna, The Outwaters, Tinsman Road, Unnamed Found Footage Festival, Unnamed Found Footage Festival Vol 8, Violet Burns
No Comments