There is definitely something suggestive in the neo-noir director David Rosenthal “A Single Shot” today and, once dodge the inevitability of scontatezza, the cinema can boast the virtue of honesty. And this is one of those cases.
Permeated the charm of the gloomy forest areas of America, this photograph of the Province, taken from the pages of the script by Matthew F. Jones, taken from his novel of the same name, has the charisma of a thriller that demands the tone of a drama told with style and form, set in the pale atmosphere of suburban areas of the U.S..
During a deer hunt, John Moon (Sam Rockwell) accidentally shoots a girl hidden by the foliage of trees. John has not yet opened his mouth, in the scenes that make up the opening words of the film, but to talk about are the traits of the figure of a man marked by economic difficulties and fatigue from the ground to pick up the pieces of a family disintegrated.
In the silent-minute prologue of John, in a panic, trying to hide the body, but runs into the camp of the girl, where he finds a chest full of money, the man decides to take, to be immediately subjected to threats and target of very dangerous people. Rosenthal, a bit ‘as the start of “Prisoners” by Denis Villeneuve, begins the story by inserting it in the scenery of misty woods immersed in silence and surrounded by soft colors and bluish gray and wet lands fertilized by nature, water, trees and dews strokes from opera solitude of a province and suit almost incorporeal. The introduction is long and without a word, and the work of the director and Rockwell realized under professional synergy and empathy in a language of cinema that flows immediately into the bowels leaving the signature in the eye.
So the uncertain light of dawn, the soft colors and desaturated and the environment that welcomes the opening shots of the film leave the place without noise and imbalances, the design of Rockwell man who, in accordance with a sincere film, outlines without speaking a character marked by loneliness and marginalization.
Marginalization that not only looks human and social – cf. the scene of John, into the house of his wife (Kelly Reilly) discovers the babysitter half-naked in the company of a tattooed man (Joe Anderson), and scroll through the images on TV of a porn film and playing in the next room a child – but also geographical and environmental aspects of the photograph of a rural life afflicted and closed in itself. Rockwell, versatile actor, John makes it embodies a character and intense human in a performance that should be mentioned among the best of his career.
Rosenthal sets a muted pace and slow, cumbersome and never sliced but on the contrary, loose from the reins of Mannerism, the director sticks his camera in the flesh poor of America and will probe the soul with a decoupage progressive and balanced which results in After a methodical growing, it proves even greater than the sum of its parts and the narrative confirms consistency and credibility.
Then “A Single Shot” is the form of a film frank and honest, who can speak a little but expresses the authentic language of the performance of identity.
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