"Director Joshua Erkman's feature debut manages to deliver an impressively creepy horror exercise that's also a bit of a send-up of horror conventions. At the same time, it feels like a weird dodge into borderline-abstraction and unknowable mystery that drains all the realism away, making this a mannered film-making exercise. But there's no denying the level of craft on show, or the original way Erkman throws together practitioners of highfalutin art-world discourse and skeevy low-lifes, with bloody results."
"In A Desert, we first meet photographer Alex (Kai Lennox) as he drives around the desiccated terrain of California's Yucca Valley, listening to smooth contemporary jazz on his fancy SUV's sound system and pulling over to take pictures of abandoned buildings. He shoots his images on a fancy 8x10 inch apparatus that uses photographic plates that need to be exposed for 10 second intervals."
A Desert is Joshua Erkman's feature debut. The film delivers an impressively creepy horror exercise and a send-up of horror conventions. It drifts into borderline-abstraction and unknowable mystery that drains realism, producing a mannered filmmaking exercise. The film displays high craft and originality by juxtaposing practitioners of art-world discourse with skeevy low-lifes, yielding bloody results. The film shares DNA with recent highbrow-meets-lowbrow scare films such as I Saw the TV Glow, A Ghost Story, and Hereditary. The narrative follows photographer Alex as he prowls California's Yucca Valley, photographing abandoned sites, then succumbs to a motel encounter that precipitates a shocking caesura.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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