Review: One Night Only
How the Sky Will Melt | Matthew Wade | USA | 2015 | 90 minutes
Micro-Wave Cinema Series, 4070 Vilas Hall, Sunday, October 25, 7:00pm»
Matthew Wade’s How the Sky Will Melt mixes an evocative synth score with a wide range of grainy imagery, including barren landscapes, brightly colored eggs and mushrooms, and alternate realities. But Edwanike Harbour suggests that the film needs more coherence and less tedium.
Scores of film students cite David Lynch as a major influence. Unfortunately, few of them will achieve at the level of an auteur, try as they might. Lynch has some semblance of coherence in his material even if it’s mired in enigmatic imagery. Matthew Wade’s How the Sky Will Melt is a feeble attempt to emulate a dystopia-cum-Lynchian nightmare.
The film begins with several shots of the protagonist, Gwen Osborne (Sara Lynch) walking through some barren, distant land, accompanied by one of the more Tangerine-Dream-like scores I’ve heard in awhile. The grainy Super 8mm quality creates tension early on as you can feel a palpable foreboding sickness growing over you. Anyone who has seen the original Last House on the Left—or any Wes Craven film—gets the sense that you are in for some classic grindhouse horror. Despite some B-movie level horrific effects, however, the incoherent plot, phoned-in acting, and mind-numbing tedium can only disappoint.
Wade never clearly establishes Gwen’s setting, which could be any time or any place where strip malls litter the landscape with nondescript Americana. Gwen returns home after working on an album in a mildly successful rock band. She meets up with friends who are just as washed out emotionally as she is. She’s so above it all as she eats at generic burger joints and has meta-conversations about the banalities that idiotic people exchange in their day-to-day humdrum lives. Gwen appears ready to have some sort of transformative experience. But an amalgam of nonsensical events take place that go beyond the realm of experimental.
Things get weird when Gwen stumbles upon some brightly colored eggs in a nest on one of her many lonesome journeys into the wilderness. She and her friends eat a big, red mushroom and a giant bloodied man falls from the sky. There’s also an odd View-Master-like object that can show alternate realities. Don’t look for a great deal of thematic integrity here because there really isn’t any outside of the eggs and vibrant colors. There are scenes where Gwen talks to someone/something we can’t see that might have some impact on her decision-making. Her father appears as a somewhat sympathetic figure but then disappears after eating a rainbow cake made from the colored eggs. No amount of editing could really put this together in a more cogent way. I don’t mind if a film is shot in anachronistic fashion but I do mind if it is a jumbled mess.
Even as a metaphor for emptiness, loneliness, and isolation the film fails to execute. The characters talk without saying anything and they remain as empty as the landscape. The most jaded of individuals can find something worth conversing about, but these characters can’t even have real conversations without mocking what they believe people discuss. The performances woefully lack in depth in any form or fashion. I almost wish there were no dialogue as the inane banter that the characters deliver adds nothing to the movie. There’s nothing particularly challenging here.
In the darkest of situations, there must be some bright spots. I still love Super 8mm, so the grainy film stock took me back to a time and place long before DCP. The film was shot 1.66:1 with saturated colors in some scenes and more muted ones in others. At times the image reminded me of some early Italian giallo films. Wade wrote the score so I hope he sticks to creating soundtracks in the future. I love any sort of John Carpenter-esque horror-synth track and Wade could easily have a career as a music supervisor.
Lynch’s Mulholland Drive was a concept for a TV show for ABC that never came to fruition. As loose at that film gets, there is still a cogent plot. I don’t need to see the half-realized version of a student thesis—or whatever How the Sky Will Melt was—thrown together and called an “art film.”
In the end, I felt the same emptiness displayed by Gwen and the characters. It wasn’t the kind of emptiness one feels when they have been wrenched emotionally from a tear-jerking masterpiece. This was the emptiness of sticking with a 90-minute film despite being let down after hopes had been elevated.
Note: The Micro-Wave presentation on Sunday, October 25 will be the first-ever public screening of How the Sky Will Melt, and it will be followed by a Q&A with director and composer Matthew Wade via Skype.