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| Gazer Photo: Ariella Mastroianni, courtesy of Telstar Films |
Director Ryan J Sloan and co-writer Ariella Mastroianni's Gazer revolves around Frankie (played by Mastroianni), a young mother suffering with dyschronometria, that affects her perception of time. After a violent and horrific incident resulted in her husband's death, which Frankie revisits in her body horror-esque nightmares, she's desperate to save money for her daughter's future. When Frankie takes a job from a mysterious woman with a troubled history, she becomes embroiled in a vicious murder.
Sloan is an electrician turned filmmaker, with no previous credits, while Mastroianni is an actor and writer, originally from Ontario, Canada, who co-founded the music and entertainment magazine NKD MAG in college.
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| Gazer Photo: Ariella Mastroianni, courtesy of Telstar Films |
In conversation with Eye For Film, Sloan and Mastroianni discussed the conflict of art and commerce, and the theme of inner and outer lives. They also spoke about the decision to lean into body horror, and building on the shoulders of giants.
Paul Risker: A feature début is a milestone moment. What thoughts are running through your mind as you look back on this achievement?
Ariel Mastroianni: I think we're still trying to wrap our heads around it all. Ryan and I started to make this film because we wanted to make something that we wanted to see — there was no other intention. We put our own money into it and self-financed and self-produced it with a couple of friends. The thing that drove the whole journey was our passion for this kind of cinema that we haven't seen in a while, and I love you saying that you have to go back and revisit it because…
Ryan Sloan: It was designed to reward you on a second watch. We put in a lot of Easter eggs and little hints early on to the point where the next film that we're writing will have these little hints in Gazer.
We made this film over two and a half years on weekends in April and November. So, we were able to be a little more specific about what we wanted to do, and how we wanted to do it, within reason, of course.
PR: Filmmakers and actors have expressed the idea that a story will speak to you and tell you what it needs. Similarly, actors will reveal details about their characters to the filmmaker. The economics and bureaucracy of film production are counterintuitive to the value of taking time and exercising patience, which can allow the film to fully express itself.
RS: Yeah, it's like art and commerce don't make sense together. One is always going to be strangling the other — at least in America we were forced to think in these terms. We didn't have access to film grants or any of those things, and we met so many people in France, Germany and other countries that were telling us, "Oh, yeah, we made our film from a government grant." I was like, "Oh, yeah, explain how that works."
AM: There are short films that are made for more than this cost.
RS: They'll get $100 to $200,000 to do a short film.
AM: But we never knew how to navigate that because we didn't have access. All we knew was to make the film on our own terms, and also narratively, the way we took our time was intentional. Everyone wants things to be fast, fast, fast, but we want to sit with Frankie and ask how that makes you feel? We wanted the audience to feel the way Frankie was feeling. So, the way we structured the first part of the film is something you don't often see.
RS: The first half of the film is more of a character study where we're learning who Frankie is. In the background, there's this incident that happened, and this mystery that has started to develop that Frankie will eventually be activated to try to unravel. But first, we wanted to just sit people in the life of Frankie, to take it in and become one with her.
PR: One of the lines that leaped out to me was, "You see people for who they really are when they think no one is watching." Throughout, it's as if Frankie is only letting us, as an audience, see what she wants us to see, or you as the storytellers. The way we sit with Frankie is in-tune with the film's ideas.
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| Gazer Photo: Ariella Mastroianni, courtesy of Telstar Films |
AM: I love that you picked up on that. In that moment, when we're sitting with Frankie, it's interesting because there is a dialogue happening. We are seeing Frankie for who she is in her external life, but her internal life is different — it is violent and chaotic.
RS: She's not even ready to come to terms with what has happened.
AM: No, she's working through that. She's trying to make sense of what happened, the guilt that she feels and face how she was a part of it.
What's interesting about her is she keeps her head down, and she's trying to live this small existence. I love looking out on the street right now and thinking about who else is doing the same thing. What are these inner worlds that we don't let people see? But you're right, there is that dialogue.
RS: Building on that, if you suspend the information and force the audience to lean in and take a closer look, the hope is that they will become one with Frankie. They become complicit with her story, wherever she goes. It's this unreliable narrator, if you will.
PR: The body horror sequences juxtapose with the rest of the film, including the neo-noir elements. This helps to create these different layers. After the first viewing, I found myself thinking about what other layers there might be, and so, if I were to describe Gazer, I'd choose the word layered.
RS: I think that's a great way to put it. Body horror has been somewhat developed by Cronenberg or made famous by him, we'll say, right? And what's interesting is, I see so many women connecting more with body horror today than anything else, like Coralie Fargeat's The Substance, for instance. Even Ariel, while we were writing this, I screened Videodrome, eXistenZ and a couple of other Cronenberg films and she connected so hard with the body horror stuff.
AM: For this narrative in particular, there was a reason why it felt so necessary to approach Frankie's inner life, these nightmare sequences in that way. As Ryan and I were developing the script, we were going to first treat them as flashbacks and real lived pasts. Then, we started to examine what they would look like as dreams, as she's falling into her zoning out. The more we thought about what happened to her that night, we kept adjusting our language. We went from saying "dream sequence" to "this is a nightmare; this is horrific, this is terrible. What a violent and haunting thing that happened." We referred to it as "Frankie's haunted past." We started to take note of this change in language, and realising we were already saying things like "nightmare" and "haunted past", we thought, 'Why don't we lean into this?' If it feels like a nightmare to Frankie, it should feel that way to the audience. So, it became about how we can use genre to elevate the way Frankie feels.
RS: But also dream language. We talked a lot about the dreams that we were having and the nightmares that we'd had. I remember very visceral nightmares as a child, and we took a lot from that.
Dreams don't make sense a lot of the time. They're surreal, and they bend logic and morph. A place that looks like home doesn't feel like home, or a place that doesn't look like home is home. There are so many illogical things that happen in a dream and a nightmare. So, we got very excited, and we thought it was a brilliant way to explore what happened to her in the past, while being ambiguous.
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| Gazer Photo: Ariella Mastroianni, courtesy of Telstar Films |
AM: Yes, and there's so much tension in these sequences because, as Ryan said, it is her home. It is a place that holds so much love and warmth, and it should feel that way because it's her home, but it's unsettling. It is so different to her cold, stark daily life. So, we're giving it this feeling of warmth, but it's not warm, and also, Frankie has found herself at the intersection of these two modes, which are her husband's death and then her daughter's birth. Those are the two most physical things that can happen to someone — dying and being born. So, as we were exploring those sequences, it made sense to approach it in a more physical way.
PR: Cinema is a shared language, and it's difficult not to be influenced by other films. Gazer has a specific feel that connects to certain cinematic traditions, such as The Conversation. In what ways do you feel you took that shared language and used it to express your individual voices?
RS: Funnily enough, we felt like we got permission to do that by watching the lineage of Antonioni's Blow-Up and Coppola's The Conversation to De Palma's Blow Out, and even the great 2006 film, The Lives Of Others, which is also related. We found these films follow a spiral structure, and as we were talking about the films we were inspired by, and the films that we want to see more of, we found that films like Memento and Vertigo all fall into this same writing structure.
That was the kind of story we wanted to tell, because we hadn't seen anything like that in a very long time. When I watch those movies, I feel like somebody's speaking in my voice. So, I don't feel like I'm necessarily stealing from anyone, so much as I'm just building upon what they've done, and that's cinema, right? We're always building upon the shoulders of giants that came before us, and that's why I think cinema is so important too.
We need to get away from television because it's being diluted. People are making content; they're not making films anymore. They're not telling stories that matter, which they're passionate about.
AM: We're in a delicate state overall in the film industry; it's a difficult time. It's hard for audiences to see movies because they're so expensive, and it's hard to make movies because they're so expensive.
RS: But they're also being trained to consume content.
AM: Yes, of course, but I think that's why we're so grateful for our film to have been embraced in this way. A film that was made so far outside the industry just shows that we are at a turning point where something needs to change, or people are more willing to embrace a film like ours because it is different, and it's a little messy…
RS: And because it's a little reminiscent as well, right? It's a little familiar. It's not the most original thing in the world, where you're going to think, 'What is that? I don't know if I can get into that.' It does have these entry points for you.
AM: Right, and we made it because, like we've said before, it's a film that we wanted to see and to see in theatres. It's fun and it's suspenseful.
We always wanted to find our communities, and we always felt like outsiders in terms of the film world because we never had a way in. So, we were always looking for people who liked the same films that we did, and through Gazer, we're hoping to find those people that we would go see The Conversation and Blow Up with. They're out there, and I hope that we find them.
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| Gazer Photo: Ariella Mastroianni, courtesy of Telstar Films |
PR: The films you've mentioned all provoke a strong sense of feeling, which can be difficult to articulate in words. It's one of the things I appreciate about the type of cinematic heritage Gazer seeks to belong to. In as much as we should critique films to better understand them, films are also meant to affect us emotionally and leave us with a feeling.
RS: What's beautiful about it is the feeling you're getting will be different for me, that will be different for Ariel. That's the beauty of cinema and specifically these older films.
I want to be a part of that history. I want to make a film that's divisive, that people say, "This isn't five stars; this isn't one star. I'll put it somewhere in the middle, because I don't know how I feel about it yet." Then, they'll return to it years later and feel one way or the other about it. I can't control that because it's not mine anymore, and I love that.
Another great film that has come out in the past 10 years is Lee-Chang-dong's Burning. That's a film we've rewatched a ton of times while writing Gazer, and every time we watch that movie, it hits differently and says something else. That's only one of the recent films where I felt that way.
AM: Leaving a movie with a feeling is the most important thing. The goal, at least for us as storytellers, is for you to not pay as much attention to anything other than the way you feel about the film. The environment, the world, the story is meant to linger with you as you leave the theatre.
There was one review someone left us on Letterboxd that was supposed to be a negative criticism. They said, "One star for the most interminable feeling movie ever." I thought, 'That to me is five stars. You're supposed to feel that way, and I'm glad that lingered and that is what you left with.' Films are supposed to transport you into a different space.
Gazer screened at the 2025 Glasgow Film Festival and opens in US theatres on 4 April.
