The Fearway

Has any showdown on the highway film ever come close to Steven Spielberg’s Duel? Certainly not many, and there’s a reason for that. What Spielberg understood was that to be effective a film like this has to be minimal, every shot focused on managing the tension, never distracting from the central threat. The Fearway does the opposite, claiming to be scary but suffocated by additional plotting as unnecessary as it is obvious, and with terrible acting to boot.

On their way to visit her father, who is in poor health following a series of heart attacks, Sarah (Shannon DaLonzo) and Michael (Justin Gordon) have a bizarre accident, skidding on what appears to be a patch of ice on a long desert road in the daytime. There’s a mystery here, so one starts out hoping that the film will go somewhere interesting, but instead most of the running time is spent literally and metaphorically driving in circles.

One benefit of the setting is that director Robert Gajic gets his orange and teal for free, but that’s as close as the film comes to achieving even a borrowed sense of style. Its efforts to establish a scary villain are likely to provoke laughter. Driving a big black car, he’s a Black guy with filed teeth, cross earrings and heavy eyeliner who likes to pose next to crows and communicates by growling. When he growls at Sarah she runs away squealing like a Karen who has spent her whole life somehow unaware of heavy metal. It’s hard to believe that this is the person we’re supposed to root for.

On the other hand, DaLonzo at least manages a modicum of acting. Gordon flounders a bit in the very simple role of a man who once wrote a hit song and who is now getting cold feet about marriage (all the development his character gets). He’s more dull than amusing, but Simon Phillips, as the manager of the diner where they seek help, is spectacularly bad, and the film picks up a bit when he’s onscreen. It’s not just the clunky delivery, it’s the ridiculous quantity of exposition he’s saddled with, even as his character tries to keep secrets. There are some rather wonderful lines in there, but not in the way that writer Noah Bessey is likely to have intended.

Indeed, this is one of the most pretentious scripts I’ve encountered in months, and that’s an odd thing to be thinking during awards season. It goes way beyond what’s necessary to justify the plot, and strains for a gravity which none of its actors can command. It’s a shame because there is an idea here, even if it’s an old one, and a film more willing to live within its means might have made something of it. As a rule it’s a good thing when filmmakers are prepared to push their limits, but if you’re going to take it this far, you need, at the very least, to be in control of the laughs.

The only scary moment here comes when the protagonists exhibit a potentially fatal failure to understand how deserts work. Nevertheless, the chances of any viewer imitating their action seems slim. This is forgettable stuff. It’s clearly a low budget effort and most likely somebody put their heart and soul into it, so it’s sad to have to say this, but what it really needed was some thought.