A Desert

Fine art photographer Alex Clark (Kai Lennox), creeping into the haze of deep middle age, wants to go back to the old ways of doing things. He made a splash years ago with a series about abandoned places, captured with a large-format camera, and believes he can return to that original muse. So he departs his Los Angeles home, taking along his antiquated gear, all of it cumbersome and beautiful. He leaves behind his mobile, swaps the GPS for foldable maps, and drives into remote reaches of the Southwest in search of transcendent deserts, and the splendor of decay, the places where civilization recedes and, as Alex puts it, nature reclaims its topography. Shattered tarmac, shriveled trees, empty housing developments, a disused military base, a pet cemetery. He’s especially drawn to a vacant but well-preserved cinema, its seats draped in plastic, the curtain a stretch of almost luminous corrugated crimson. He photographs the blank screen, the surface upon which countless images once flickered and then disappeared.

Lingering in this deserted desert cinema, we’re reminded that there’s something uniquely seductive about the memory of movies. Alex feels it, and I imagine Joshua Erkman, the director of A Desert, feels it, too. His feature debut carefully showcases a glimpse—just enough to plant a seed in the minds of those who know it—of James Landis’s 1963 cult thriller The Sadist. Written by Erkman and Bossi Baker, A Desert has a narrative structure, at once angular and looping, that seems to draw inspiration from the bracing detours of Psycho. By the time we arrive at A Desert’s closing scenes, it becomes clear that certain moments from the unfinished puzzles of David Lynch have left an indelible impression on Erkman. But evoking the spirit of great cinematic precedents, however well-crafted that evocation may be, is not quite the same as inhabiting their terrain. Much of A Desert is wonderfully intriguing, but the film feels more compelling and, curiously, more original when it adheres to the boundaries of a smart, spare genre film, rather than the dreamlike grotesquerie to which it ultimately aspires.