RESOLUTION—“There really are a lot of weird people out here.”  So says increasingly unsettled Mike to his crack-addled buddy Chris, and that’s not the half of it, in this ingeniously strange and affecting indie, the 2012 debut feature from the refreshingly inventive, multi-tasking duo of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead. Macabre and funny, real and surreal, the matrix tale qualifies as a horror story, but genre confinement is too simple for this piece and for the terrific category-warping works these guys followed it up with. *

Married, due to become a father,’Mike Danube’ (Peter Cillela) goes against his wife’s warnings and heads into the scenic/seedy California backwoods on a desperate gambit to save his old high school friend ‘Chris Daniels’ (Vinny Curran), a crack addict who’s alienated everyone and seems hell-bent on suicide-by-pipe. At the ramshackle cabin where his lost-in-tokes pal is squatting (located on an Indian Reservation) Mike handcuffs Chris to a pipe and tells him he’ll stay for a week’s worth of detox: one last shot intervention to see if Chris can or will clear up enough to ditch the high-lowlife for a real one. Chris’s withdrawal issues would be enough to deal with, but his venal dealers show up with threats, the Indian dude who owns the building (the intense Zahn McClarnon as ‘Charles’) demands they vamoose, and bizarre, there is additional creepy vibe form the other ‘resident’s of the area. Then, WTF are the unexplained ‘messages’ that pepper the days and nights thru videos, carvings, freaky sound and visual effects, going from unsettling to wrenching. The time to split is now. Or have they waited too long?

“How does an isolated tribesman in Ecuador know the difference between an alien, an angel, and a ghost? He doesn’t, but he tells a story to make sense of the infinite.”

Benson wrote it up, Moorhead manned the camera, both shared the producing, directing and editing, putting their 93 minute puzzler together for the sub-bargain basement total of just $20,000. They show as much native skill with a relative dimes worth of resources as big studio hot shots would spew millions of dollars into orgiastic explosions and pixel-raised monsters. Instead of cliche jump cuts for shock’s sake (the kind you can see coming a few seconds before a director rams them into your face) these pretty darn wise guys believe in the slow-burn approach to build tension. Rather than ladle on gore, they keep violence, when it comes, at a remove, but still carrying a visceral psychological jolt. Instead of showing off with obtuse angles—or God forbid, shaking the camera like someone running downstairs in an earthquake—the placement and hold of every shot feels just right, even of something as mundane as a parked truck near a freeway, The shoot was done in the hilly region east of San Diego, territory they would revisit to great effect five years later in The Endless, the deep dive followup to this story about ‘stories’. Laid back Cilella (sort of a lower key William Peterson) and energy-dispensing Curran (Jack Black without hamming it to death) are perfectly in sync; each making the most of their feature debuts.

With Bill Oberst Jr. (quietly piercing as the self-isolated Frenchman who muses about eternity), Kurt David Anderson, Josh Higgins, Emily Montague and Skyler Meacham. The film-makers cameo as smile-zonked members of a local cult—presaging 2017’s upscaled The Endless, in which Benson and Moorhesd have the lead roles (along with doing everything else) and Cilella, Curran and Montague briefly revisit their Resolution characters.

* Benson: “While the “defies genre classification” part is accurate, we also proudly embrace that we are “a horror movie.” Even though Resolution is not an homage to anything in particular, and every decision we made went toward making something we’d never seen before, there is one horror movie tradition we firmly stuck to: making the smartest, funniest, creepiest movie we could make, with whatever resources we could scrounge up.”

Moorhead speaks: https://modernhorrors.com/guest-editorial-aaron-moorhead-goes-behind-the-scenes-of-resolution/