Disconnected

There are two scenes that, I think, encapsulate Disconnected's ambition and construction. The first scene is of its main character, Alicia. She has suffered a loss. She is at home shortly after the funeral, wearing only a long shirt and underwear. She is sitting in the couch, legs pulled up close to her chest, a glass of gin in her hand and the bottle nearby. She is crying, but we only see it. Any sound the scene might be expected to have is muted by a very loud ticking clock. It is gorgeous shot composition and a beautiful character moment; we are trapped with Alicia for an uncomfortable amount of time, the passage of time filling our ears, reminding us of the inexorable march of mortality, the ticking clock underscoring her grief. And then there's another scene. Alicia is sitting on the couch. She has been getting harassing phone calls from not one but two sources; one, an ex-boyfriend that cheated on her with her twin sister that won't leave Alicia alone. The other says nothing, only filling her ears with a discordant, unearthly noise, like white noise, a modem squall, and the screams of the hopelessly insane all smashed together. She has grown to fear the ringing of the phone ... and it rings. She is terrified to pick it up. What makes this scene notable is that the camera is placed in such a position where a lens flare has centered itself on the shot. The scene is barely visible, It is not merely amateurish, it is flagrantly incompetent. Such is the dichotomy of Disconnected. To read the description here on Letterboxd, one would assume it's a straight-forward blend of a thriller and a slasher; woman leaves her cheating, abusive boyfriend, meets a nice film geek, there's a psycho on the loose killing and raping women (in that order), and she's getting these ghostly phone calls. Are the calls connected to her ex or current partner? Are they connected to the killer? And then you press play, and you find a movie that is both somehow manages to be more ambitious and less skilled than nature should allow to co-exist. The makers of Disconnected clearly did not want their movie lumped in with the slashers of the day, and, at times, went to great lengths to distance itself from it by trying to inject as much art house sensibility as possible. Unfortunately for Disconnected, its load-bearing structure can't always support the weight of the ambitions. It was made for less than $50,000, and it shows. Everything is shot on location, and dialogue is often ADR'ed to less than convincing effect. Half the budget had to be licensing music, because there is a ton of it, and you get at least three montages. But then you get a moment like the one I mentioned above, or a part near the end where the movie stops being an actual motion picture and becomes some kind of experimental, European art piece, as black and white pictures flip by instead of actual motion for a solid minute and a half. Shots are held for uncomfortably long times, and whether it was because they needed to pad out the run time, or they felt it could give set the movie apart, is unknown. And there's the intercut scenes of a police detective speaking to ... internal affairs? a supervisor? ... about the investigation into the serial killer, and at one point, he is asked about his wardrobe, and it may or may not be a break in character. And they left it in anyway. This avant-garde, almost Dadaist, approach extends to the script, where some plot points connect, some don't, and many are left dangling. There is an old man who appears at the beginning of the movie whom Alicia tries to help by offering him to use her phone; he literally vanishes without a trace and it is never mentioned again ... until the final scene, when an uncomfortably long shot of the back of her apartment building is broken up by the old man leaving her apartment. What does this mean? I'm not even sure the creators could say, so your guess is as good as mine. How does the terrible noise manage to break into other phone calls, or even happen when the phone is on the hook? Don't know, and it's best you don't ask. Why does Alicia accuse her sister of sleeping with her boyfriend but also willingly goes shopping with her? How does movie fanatic Franklin not own a VCR? Disconnect has no time for your questions. It is deliberately, defiantly, almost antagonistically obtuse in its presentation. It lumber lugubriously forward, surreal and dream-like at all times, presenting a form of reality that is adjacent to, but not quite tethered to, our own, and it is proud of that. Whether you will appreciate Disconnected as is, I cannot say. Its fractured narrative, distinct cheapness (there are at least two scenes with flubbed lines, giving the impression this was a one-take-only shoot), and an artistic ambition that is both mismatched to its genre while also giving it its own identity, cannot just be recommended willy-nilly. That would be irresponsible. The closest movie I can compare this to is the equally low-budget and equally surreal Scream For Help, and even that didn't feel as irrational as Disconnected is. I think it's a must-watch deep cut for horror fans looking for something out of the ordinary, but I can also see why it is a deep cut.