A desperately-scrawled cry for help left in a postbox finds its way to the local Dead Letter Office, where it catches the attention of an expert investigator and his colleagues.
Grimmfest Says: Truth they say, is stranger than fiction, and never was that age-old adage better illustrated than by this twisted, torn-from-the-headlines tale of a hapless synthesizer developer held hostage by his increasingly desperate and deranged financial sponsor, and the efforts of Dead Letter Office investigator with mysterious secret service connections to find him.
Evoking its small-town 1980s setting as much by the shooting style and lighting as by the unobtrusive production design, it’s a carefully crafted, low-key study in human strangeness, by turns darkly funny and deeply disturbing, filled with unlikely, offbeat details and character twists, and almost Pynchonesque in its depiction of the more baroque workings of American bureaucracy.
The constantly shifting narrative focus toys with audience sympathies and expectations in masterful fashion, as events grow ever more strange, unpredictable, and improbable, but what comes over most strongly is the wry humanism at the film’s core, the interest in people, in their quirks and oddness, even when that becomes toxic, as in the case of Trent, the film’s creepy yet oddly sympathetic antagonist, the psychopathic Trent, beautifully played by John Fleck.
SCREENING WITH….
THE BLUE DIAMOND (USA, 16 min) Cert 15 UK PREMIERE
Director: Sam Fox. Cast: Barbara Crampton, Desiree Staples.
A grieving daughter tries to find closure, following the death of her toxic mother. But the cultish 80s apres ski club her mother founded is perhaps not the best place to do so.