Breaking up can get ugly, especially when you have a homemade flamethrower at your disposal.
Indie sensation “Bellflower” hits select theaters this weekend, and it’s hard to picture a more unconventional film winning over movie goers. But it will all the same. The movie takes a timeless story, that of a broken-hearted soul unable to process his grief, and transforms it into a look at the male ego stripped bare. It’s ugly and beautiful, violent and gorgeous, a story as blistered the grainy film stock used to tell it. You won’t be able to shove it out of your mind.
Woodrow and Aiden (Writer/director Evan Glodell and Tyler Dawson) spend their days souping up their muscle car and finalizing plans to build a homemade flame thrower. They’ve got a bad case of the post apocalyptic blues, and when the end of the world comes a calling, “Mad Max” style, they want to be ready.
In the meantime, they lead aimless lives, the kind you might associate with disaffected teens, not 20-somethings. But when Woodrow meets Milly (Jessie Wiseman) at a local bar his life gets a Polaroid shake. The two share a lengthy road trip date, but their love is doomed from the start. And Woodrow doesn’t have the social skills to deal with heartbreak.
He’s much better at destroying, not creating.
“Bellflower” delivers a film saturated with style, from the scratchy look of the print to the adolescent pose of its main characters. The existence of Medusa, the classic car the boys can’t stop noodling with, might seem like a standard vehicle for male bonding. But the ferocity of their interest in the project, and the teen-speak they use in describing it and everything else in their lives, reflects a stunted emotional growth bound to cause problems.
But Glodell, the film’s writer/director as well as its star, keeps the focus on Woodrow’s fragile psyche. That discipline grafts the experimental elements into Woodrow’s descent and gives us a window into the film’s final act.
Wiseman excels as the heartbreaker here, a woman who offers a meek warning to Woodrow early in their courtship but lets him fall for her all the same. You can’t blame him. She’s curvaceous and bold, a beauty drawn to his man-child behavior.
The film’s final 20 minutes take an explosive turn, and it’s here where Glodell’s affinity for the material is tested. Some early flashbacks hint at the nightmares to come, but by the end we’re so emotionally invested in the characters it still feels like a series of gut punches.
“Bellflower” defines the phrase, “acquired taste.” For those seeking a blast of pure storytelling unleavened by the niceties of mainstream filmmaking, “Bellflower” is bracing to its core. It’s also the ultimate tonic to those suffering from rom-com overload.
(Photo: In “Bellflower,” the protagonists soup up their car to prepare it for the apocalypse – or a really nasty breakup. Oscilloscope Laboratories)
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