A Desert is the first feature film from director Joshua Erkman (who co-wrote the film with Bossi Baker). It has been described as a neo noir / horror hybrid – although, in every way, this film can certainly stand as pure horror. It is quite self-conscious about its horror lineage, and it evokes all the emotions you expect from horror: it’s unsettling, disturbing, shocking, terrifying, and at times repulsive. Its images and, above all, its central devastating trajectory stay with you long after the credits roll. A Desert is a beautiful and devastating film – and, although watching it is at times difficult, it’s also an important film.
A Desert begins with Alex Clark (Kai Lennox), a middle-aged photographer who is traveling the Southwest in old school fashion (no GPS) to try to recapture the artistic inspiration that generated his first (and highly acclaimed) book of photography published twenty years ago. In the present, he has clearly been struggling – and his phone calls with his wife from his verging-on-seedy motel room suggest he’s been relying on her financially in ways he’s not proud of. Suffice it to say, his life has been on a downward arc. But in the deserted, abandoned and even ruined places of the Yucca Valley, Alex does seem finally to be finding the beauty and power that have been eluding his camera for two decades.
A Desert draws the viewer into Alex’s journey, as he is the only character we encounter for a significant early portion of the film. It’s important to where Erkman’s film eventually goes that we understand what kind of photographer Alex is. He is a photographer of the posthuman. For the early part of the film, while A Desert is intent on telling Alex’s story, it too is a posthuman film, as it follows Alex into abandoned buildings and the ruins of a housing development. Alex is clearly drawn to landscapes of decline. His first book was called Death of the New West – and he says to his wife on the phone, “I’m always so focused on the landscape, buildings – everything but people.” When Alex is explaining what he does to a Renny (Zachary Ray Sherman), a man who, along with his sister ‘Susie Q’ (Ashley Smith), is staying in the motel room next to his, he tells him that he focuses on empty places where “nature is gradually reclaiming its topography from what man has built on it.” It’s here where Alex’s posthuman philosophy – the philosophy of an educated and middle-class man – starts to falter. Renny looks at him, and at his book, and calls the places that feature in it “poor old busted up places” and then calls Alex a “tourist.”
The abandoned, ruined places Alex photographs
Renny and Susie Q (who, despite what they profess, are clearly not siblings) shatter Alex’s life with their poverty, crassness, drug-use, and violence. Alex may think he’s photographing empty landscapes, but the intrusion into his life of Renny and Susie Q show that, at the core of A Desert, is the insistence that those landscapes are actually not empty: nature – as in vegetation and animals, with their still beauty – are not the only ones taking back ruined places. Humans – abject and marginalized humans – live (have always lived) in those places. These are the kinds of humans that Alex’s ‘civilized’ world, with its philosophy of posthumanism, doesn’t recognize or even see.
In a key scene, Renny lures Alex into the desert to show him something. It appears to be a beautiful stone formation. But then Renny says, “My grandfather lived under those rocks” – at least until the military “stormed the place, shot him, and filled it in.” Renny then takes Alex to a broken-down and clearly long-abandoned shack, telling Alex that it’s his home – he grew up there. Alex is incredulous, replying “It looks like no one’s lived there since the dust bowl.” Renny thinks Alex is calling him a liar, but Alex just can’t imagine that people live (and have long been living) in these deserted places.
That, yes, people live in his ruined landscapes is a lesson Alex fatefully learns. As A Desert shifts, moving to a focus on Alex’s wife, Sam (Sarah Lind) and the private detective she hires to find Alex, Harold Palladino (David Yow), Harold re-traces Alex’s movements and finds a Bible in his motel room bedside table. He opens it and reads a passage from Isaiah 34:14, describing a place reduced to ruins because of God’s judgment: “The wild beast of the desert should also meet with the jackals, and a white goat shall bleat to its companion. Also, the night creature shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.” Alex meets “the wild beast” in the ruined places of the Southwest – and the “jackals” that haunt those places irrevocably change his life and the film.
A Desert then follows Harold’s and Sarah’s trek through the Southwest in pursuit of Alex. Like Alex, Harold is a photographer of sorts. He follows Alex and takes his own photographs: his photographs are of the same abandoned places, but he’s searching for clues, searching for the human, the person – searching for Alex; he’s not seeking to craft the perfect landscape without people. And what Harold and Sarah discover are horrors – horrors that include still other ways of using film and taking pictures. In the end, all three of the main characters – Alex, Sarah, and Harold – find that abandoned landscapes are never “everything but people”; indeed, they aren’t even abandoned. Instead, they find the “wild beast of the desert.” And this beast gives the lie to anyone who’s ever thought about or tried to capture artistically the “posthuman.”
Earlier in A Desert, in a flashback, Alex and Sarah lie in bed and stare at one of Alex’s photographs framed on the wall. It’s the blank screen of an abandoned drive-in movie theatre. They talk about what they see in, what they project onto, that blank screen. At the end of the film, Sarah returns to this abandoned drive-in, and she’s come to realize that you can’t just project anything you want onto a “blank” canvas – because there’s no such thing as a blank canvas, as an empty landscape. Others fill those canvases with images, and some of those images are too horrible to contemplate – but sometimes you have no choice but to look.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) looms over Erkman’s A Desert – and the two films pair beautifully, resonating with each other in endless ripples. They both contain shocking events that tear the expected narrative fabric; they both present characters launched in search of others; they are both about unwanted things that fill screens and eyes; they are both about various kinds of abandonment; they are both about compulsion and entrapment. They are both important, difficult, and horrifying films.
A Desert is distributed by Dark Sky Films and will be in general release in theatres on May 16.
