You know you’re dealing with a special movie when you watch it at least twice, have the damnedest time describing it, and can’t stop thinking about it. Bellflower, the debut feature from writer/director Evan Glodell, is one of those kinds of movies for me. It opens tonight at the Seven Gables, and I warrant you won’t see anything like it all year.
Glodell plays Woodrow, a guy who whiles away his time exercising a serious Mad Max fetish by cobbling together a flamethrower and muscle car with his pal Aiden (Tyler Dawson). The two of them stumble into a bar one night, and Woodrow meets cute with Milly (Jessie Wiseman), a fiery blonde with charisma to match her elfin charm. A romance develops, but things go sour. And Woodrow’s world goes way, way south. That’s as much of a synopsis as you’ll get (or is even possible, for that matter) from this end.
It’s an impressive first film; even moreso considering that it’s a 100% independent feature financed on peanuts and shot completely under the radar. Glodell writes dialogue that’s equal parts off-the-cuff natural and graphic-novel nihilistic, and he builds characters with just enough reality to give the proceedings a core of relatability (mad props to the cast, unknowns all, who look and sound like average human beings).
The movie’s shot in carefully-crafted, sun-bleached yellows and orange-reds that telegraph apocalyptic decay even at the outset; but it still manages to surprise and unsettle at multiple turns. And somehow it welds John Hughes buddy-bonding, Richard-Linklater-style slacker romance, sidelong stoner giggles, David Lynchian dark surrealism, and Peckinpah-by-way-of-Tarantino ultraviolence into a package that gets richer, denser, and more satisfying with repeat viewings. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea by any measure, but Bellflower utterly blew my mind. You can bet I’ll be in the theater to see it again before it finishes its run.
