Joshua Erkman's feature debut, A Desert, is an impressively creepy horror exercise that also serves as a send-up of horror conventions. The film throws together practitioners of highfalutin art-world discourse and skeevy low-lifes, with bloody results, in a manner that feels both original and mannered.
Photographer Alex (Kai Lennox) drives through the desiccated terrain of California's Yucca Valley, listening to smooth jazz and taking photographs of abandoned buildings with a large-format camera. He is not especially interested in the people who live there, but when a trailer-trash-style couple (Zachary Ray Sherman and Ashley Smith) in the next motel room offer him turpentine-tasting hooch and a chance to party, Alex is too polite to resist.
After a blur of lapdance moves and lurid colours set to EDM, the film creates a caesura much like another well-known horror film whose name would spoil the twist. Following that, the story shifts to Alex's wife Sam (Sarah Lind) and private detective Harold (David Yow), who drift down the same lost highways of the valley.
Erkman, a sometime cinematographer, and director of photography Jay Keitel capture an artbook view of the economically depressed west, a style reminiscent of the Americana of Joel Meyerowitz meeting the ruination porn of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. The implication is that visitors like Alex see only the exploitable aesthetics of the area and are blind to the real human evil that exists there, out in plain sight as the final shot confirms.
The film aligns with recent highbrow-meets-lowbrow horror such as I Saw the TV Glow, A Ghost Story, and Hereditary. It is interesting, though perhaps a bit pretentious for hardcore gorehounds, but the visual and editing styles are swoony and most bewitching.
